VAIN    OBLATIONS 


VAIN  OBLATIONS 


BY 

KATHARINE    FULLERTON    GEROULD 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 
1914 


Copyright,   1914,   by   Charles   Scribner's   Sons 


Published  March,  1914 


TO 
J.  M.  F.   AND    B.  M.  F. 


;^; 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Vain  Oblations  1 

The  Mango-Seed  43 

The  Wine  of  Violence  83 

On  the  Staircase  127 

The  Tortoise  177 

The  Divided  Kingdom  233 

The  Case  of  Paramore  273 


VAIN   OBLATIONS 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

As  I  was  with  Saxe  during  the  four  most  des 
perate  weeks  of  his  life,  I  think  I  may  say  that  I 
knew  him  better  than  any  one  else.  Those  were  also 
the  four  most  articulate  weeks,  for  they  were  a  pe 
riod  of  terrible  inaction,  spent  on  the  decks  of  ocean 
steamships.  Saxe  was  not  much  given  to  talking,  but 
there  was  nothing  else  to  do.  No  book  that  has  ever 
been  written  could  have  held  his  attention  for  two 
minutes.  I  was  with  him,  for  that  matter,  off  and 
on,  until  the  end.  What  I  have  to  tell  I  got  partly 
from  my  own  observation,  partly  from  a  good  little 
woman  at  the  Mission,  partly  from  Saxe's  letters, 
largely  from  his  own  lips,  and  partly  from  natives. 
But  if  I  recorded  it  as  it  came,  unassimilated,  un- 
chronologized — one  fact  often  limping  into  camp  six 
months  after  its  own  result — the  story  would  be  as 
unintelligible  as  the  quipus  of  the  Incas.  It  has  taken 
me  three  years  of  steady  staring  to  see  the  thing 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

whole.  I  know  more  about  it  now — including  Saxe — 
than  Saxe  ever  knew.  In  point  of  fact,  one  of  the 
most  significant  pieces  of  evidence  did  not  come  in 
until  after  his  death.  (I  wish  it  clearly  understood, 
by  the  way,  that  Saxe  did  not  commit  suicide.)  But, 
more  than  that,  I  have  been  thinking  for  three  years 
about  Mary  Bradford.  I  could  tell  you  as  much  about 
what  she  suffered — the  subtlety  and  the  brutality  of 
her  ordeal — as  if  she  were  one  of  my  own  heroines. 
God  forbid  that  I  should  ever  think  of  Mary  Brad 
ford  as  "material":  that  I  should  analyze  her,  or 
dramatize  her,  or  look  at  her  with  the  artist's  squint. 
If  I  tell  her  story,  it  is  because  I  think  it  right  that 
we  should  know  what  things  can  be.  For  the  most 
part,  we  keep  to  our  own  continents:  the  cruel  na 
tions  are  the  insensitive  nations,  and  the  squeamish 
races  are  kind.  But  Mary  Bradford  was  the  finest 
flower  of  New  England;  ten  home-keeping  genera 
tions  only  lay  between  her  and  the  Quest  of  1620.  It 
is  chronic  hypersesthesia  simply  to  be  New  English; 
and  the  pure-bred  New  Englander  had  best  stick 
to  the  euphemisms,  the  approximations,  the  reti 
cences,  of  his  own  extraordinary  villages.  But  Mary 

4 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

Bradford  encountered  all  the  physical  realities  of  life 
in  their  crudest  form,  alone,  in  the  obscene  heart  of 
Africa,  with  black  faces  thrust  always  between  her 
and  the  sky.  Some  cynic  may  put  in  his  belittling 
word  to  the  effect  that  the  New  Englander  has  al 
ways  counted  physical  suffering  less  than  spiritual 
discomfort.  The  mental  torture  was  not  lacking  in 
Mary  Bradford's  case.  For  over  a  year,  the  tempta 
tion  to  suicide  must  have  been  like  a  terrible  thirst, 
death — any  death — luring  her  like  a  rippling  spring. 
I  told  Saxe  one  night  in  mid-Atlantic,  to  comfort 
him,  that  she  would  of  course  have  killed  herself  if 
she  saw  no  chance  of  escape. 

Saxe  laughed  dryly.  "That's  the  most  damnable 
thing  about  it,"  he  said.  "Mary  would  think  it  mor 
tal  sin  to  kill  herself.  She  would  stick  on  as  long  as 
God  chose  to  keep  the  breath  in  her  body." 

"Sin?"  I  queried  rather  stupidly. 

"Yes,  sin,"  he  answered.  "You  don't  know  any 
thing  about  it:  you  were  brought  up  in  Europe." 

"But  Saxe,"  I  cried,  "rather  than—"  I  did  not 
finish. 

"You  don't  know  anything  about  New  England," 
5 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

he  said.  "Damn  your  books!  Missionaries  face  every 
thing,  and  there's  more  than  one  kind  of  martyrdom. 
I  hope  she's  dead.  I  rather  think  she  is." 

His  voice  was  uneven,  but  with  a  meaningless  un- 
evenness  like  a  boy's  that  is  changing.  There  was  no 
emotion  in  it.  A  week  more  of  monotonous  plough 
ing  of  the  waves  would  just  have  broken  him,  I 
think;  but  he  pulled  himself  together  when  he 
touched  the  soil  of  Africa.  Something  in  him  went 
out  to  meet  the  curse  that  hung  low  over  the  land 
in  the  tropic  afternoon;  and  encountering  the  An 
tagonist,  his  eyes  grew  sane  again.  But  with  sanity 
came  the  reticence  of  battle.  All  that  I  know  of  Saxe's 
and  Mary  Bradford's  early  lives,  I  learned  in  those 
four  weeks.  I  have  made  out  some  things  about  her, 
since  then,  that  probably  Saxe  never  knew.  As  I 
said,  I  have  been  thinking  about  Mary  Bradford 
for  three  years,  and  it  is  no  secret  that  to  contem 
plate  is,  in  the  end,  to  know.  The  stigmata  received 
by  certain  saints  are,  I  take  it,  irrefutable  proof  of 
this.  I  do  not  pretend  to  carry  upon  me  Mary  Brad 
ford's  wounds;  I  do  not  even  canonize  her  in  my 
heart.  But  I  seriously  believe  that  she  had,  on  the 

6 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

whole,  the  most  bitter  single  experience  ever  under 
gone  by  woman;  and  much  of  the  extraordinary  hor 
ror  of  the  adventure  came  from  the  very  exquisite- 
ness  of  the  victim.  I  have  often  wondered  if  the 
Greek  and  Italian  literatures  that  she  knew  so  well 
offered  her  any  mitigating  memory  of  a  woman  more 
luckless  than  she.  Except  Jocasta,  I  positively  can 
not  think  of  one;  and  Jocasta  never  lived.  All  of  us 
have  dreams  of  a  market  where  we  could  sell  our 
old  lamps  for  new.  How  must  not  Mary  Bradford 
have  longed  to  change  her  humanities  against  mere 
foothold  on  the  soil  of  America  or  Europe!  But  my 
preface  is  too  long. 

Now  and  then  there  is  a  story  where  all  things 
work  together  for  evil  to  the  people  involved;  and 
these  stories  have,  even  for  their  protagonists,  a  hor 
rible  fascination.  The  story  of  Saxe  and  Mary  Brad 
ford  is  of  this  nature:  a  case,  as  it  were,  of  double 
chicane.  Everything  happened  precisely  wrong.  Al 
most  anything  happening  differently  would  have 
given  them  a  chance.  If  Mary  Bradford  had  been 
born  in  Virginia,  if  her  eyes  had  been  blue  instead  of 

7 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

brown,  if  Ngawa  had  come  back  three  hours  sooner 
— Maupassant  would  have  told  it  all  from  that  point 
of  view.  But  I  am  not  trying  to  make  literature  out 
of  it:  it  is  as  history  that  this  story  is  important  to 
me.  Saxe  had  been  engaged  to  Mary  Bradford  since 
her  last  year  in  college.  Her  mother  had  died  when 
Mary  was  born,  and  the  Reverend  James  Bradford 
had  sailed,  after  his  wife's  death,  for  this  little  West 
African  mission,  leaving  his  child  with  a  sister.  Mary 
was  brought  up  in  America.  When  she  was  ten,  her 
father  came  home  for  a  year  and  took  her  back  with 
him;  but  at  twelve  she  was  sent  definitely  home  to 
be  educated.  James  Bradford  could  not  have  con 
ceived  of  depriving  his  child  of  Greek  and  trigonom 
etry,  and  from  school  Mary  went  to  college.  She 
never,  at  any  time,  had  any  inclination  to  enter  upon 
missionary  work,  though  her  religious  faith  was  never 
at  any  moment  in  the  smallest  degree  shaken.  From 
her  thirteenth  year  she  had  been  an  active  and  en 
thusiastic  member  of  her  father's  denomination.  She 
was  a  bit  of  a  blue-stocking  and  occasionally  some 
what  ironic  in  speech.  When  I  asked  Saxe  "if  she 
had  wo  faults,"  these  were  all  he  could  think  of. 

8 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

When  she  became  engaged  to  Saxe,  she  stipulated 
that  she  should  spend  two  winters  with  her  father 
before  marrying.  The  separation  had  never  really 
parted  Mary  and  her  father;  they  had  never  lost  the 
habit  of  each  other.  You  see  those  sympathies  some 
times  between  father  and  daughter :  inarticulate,  usu 
ally,  like  the  speech  of  rock  to  rock,  but  absolutely 
indestructible.  There  was  no  question — I  wish  to 
emphasize  this — about  her  love  for  Saxe.  I  had,  for 
a  time,  her  letters.  It  was  a  grande  passion — to  use 
the  unhallowed  historic  phrase;  twenty  love  stories 
of  old  Louisiana  could  have  been  melted  up  into  it. 
Saxe,  of  course,  consented  to  her  going.  During  the 
second  spring  he  was  to  go  out,  her  father  was  to 
marry  them  at  the  Mission,  and  they  were  to  return 
to  America  after  a  honeymoon  in  Italy.  There  is  not 
one  detail  that  does  not,  in  the  end,  deepen  the 
irony  of  it,  if  you  look  at  it  all  long  enough.  Italy! 
All  that  romantic  shimmer  and  tinkle  against  the 
savage  fact  that  was.  She  went,  and  for  six  months 
seems  to  have  busied  herself  happily  enough  with 
good  little  Mrs.  Price  at  the  Mission.  She  picked  up 
a  few  dialects — she  was  always  remarkably  clever  at 

9 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

languages.  The  Mission  hangs  above  a  tiny  seaport 
— if  you  can  call  it  a  seaport,  for  there  is  a  great 
reef  a  few  miles  out,  and  the  infrequent  steamships 
stop  outside  that  and  send  passengers  and  letters 
in  by  boat.  It  is  not  one  of  the  regular  ports  of  call, 
and  its  chief  significance  lies  in  its  position  at  the 
mouth  of  a  large-ish  river  that  winds  inland  for  a 
few  hundred  miles,  finishing  no  one  knows  exactly 
where.  The  natives  for  a  hundred  miles  up-stream 
are  fairly  friendly  and  come  down  sometimes  in  big 
boats  to  trade;  beyond  that,  the  country  runs  into 
jungle  and  forest,  and  grows  nastier  and  nastier.  No 
one  knows  precisely  about  that  region,  and  it  lies 
just  outside  every  one's  sphere  of  influence;  but  there 
seems  to  be  a  network  of  unhealthy  trails,  a  con 
stant  intertribal  warfare,  and  an  occasional  raid  by 
the  precocious  pupil  of  an  Arab  slave-trader.  It  is 
too  far  south  for  the  big  caravans,  of  course,  but 
there  is  undoubtedly  slave-stealing — though  it  is  ex 
tremely  difficult  to  learn  anything  definite  about  the 
country,  as  there  are  a  dozen  different  tribes  speak 
ing  entirely  different  languages,  and  each  lying  tor 
tuously  about  all  the  rest.  This  is  all  that  Saxe  could 

10 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

tell  me  about  that  hinterland  which  he  had  Dever 
expected  to  be  interested  in. 

In  March,  after  Mary  reached  the  Mission  (she 
sailed  in  July,  immediately  after  graduation),  the 
chief  of  a  small  tribe  some  hundred  miles  up-stream 
descended  in  pomp  to  barter  ivory  for  such  treasure 
as  oozes  from  European  ships.  Having  seldom  con 
descended  to  trade,  he  was  disappointed  at  receiving 
so  little  for  his  ivory — a  scanty  lot  of  female  tusks — 
and  sought  distraction  and  consolation  within  ear 
shot  of  the  Mission  piano.  He  took  especially  kindly 
to  the  Reverend  James  Bradford,  gravely  inspected 
the  school,  and  issued  an  invitation  for  Mr.  Brad 
ford  to  come  up-stream  and  Christianize  his  tribe. 
The  Mission  had  worked  up  and  down  the  coast,  as 
it  could,  but  had  never  worked  inland — more  rumors 
than  boats  came  down  the  waterway,  which  was 
not  really  a  highroad  and  certainly  led  to  nothing 
good.  They  lacked  money  for  such  an  enterprise,  and 
workers;  but,  being  missionaries,  never  forgot  that 
the  river,  and  all  who  dwelt  on  its  banks,  belonged  to 
God.  It  did  not  occur  to  James  Bradford  to  refuse 
the  call,  which  he  took  quite  simply,  as  from  brother 

11 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

to  brother;  it  did  not  occur  to  Mary  Bradford  to  let 
him  go  alone,  or  to  her  father  to  protest  against  her 
accompanying  him.  The  patriarchal  tinge  is  still  per 
ceptible  in  the  New  English  conception  of  the  fam 
ily.  Let  me  say,  here,  that  there  is  no  evidence  that 
Ngawa  himself  ever  broke  faith  with  his  white  pro 
teges.  He  was,  like  them,  a  victim  of  circumstances. 

They  were  to  go  for  six  months.  That  would  bring 
them  to  September.  In  September,  three  new  workers 
were  to  come  out  to  the  Mission,  and  James  Brad 
ford  hoped  that  two  could  then  be  permanently 
spared  for  the  new  Mission  up-stream,  which  he  al 
ready  foresaw  and  yearned  over.  In  September,  he 
and  Mary  would  return  to  the  port;  in  late  April, 
Saxe  was  coming  out  to  marry  Mary.  They  departed 
under  the  escort  of  Ngawa  himself.  Mr.  Price  prom 
ised  to  get  a  boat  up  to  them  in  May,  or  at  least  a 
runner  with  letters. 

Such  details  of  the  final  catastrophe  as  Saxe  was 
acquainted  with  were  brought  to  the  Mission  by  a 
native  boy  in  September,  just  before  the  boat  was  to 
start  up-stream  (taking  Adams  and  Jenks,  the  new 
recruits)  to  bring  the  Bradfords  down.  All  reports 

12 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

had  hitherto  been  favorable,  if  not  astonishingly  so. 
Ngawa  had  listened,  and  his  heart  seemed  to  incline 
to  Mr.  Bradford's  teachings.  Mary  had  started  a 
little  school  for  the  babies.  But  Ngawa  had  no  in 
tention  of  compelling  his  people  to  embrace  Chris 
tianity:  he  simply  courteously  permitted  it  to  exist 
in  his  dominion.  As  talk  of  war  came  on,  he  was  pre 
occupied  with  the  affairs  of  his  thatched  state.  The 
populace — they  seem  to  have  been  a  gentle  crowd 
enough — grew  apathetic  to  their  apostles  and  de 
posited  the  commanded  tribute  somewhat  listlessly 
before  their  huts.  The  medicine-men,  of  course,  were 
hostile  from  the  first,  and,  as  the  war  drums  beat  in 
the  forest  and  the  men  of  the  village  gathered  to 
sharpen  their  tufted  spears,  wild  talk  had  undoubt 
edly  not  been  wanting.  The  end  had  really  been  a 
bitter  accident.  Ngawa  absented  himself  for  three 
days  to  do  some  last  exhorting  and  recruiting  in  his 
other  villages.  The  attack  that  had  not  been  expected 
for  a  week,  at  least,  was  made  a  few  hours  before  his 
return.  It  became  a  raid  rather  than  a  battle;  the 
village  resisted  the  siege  only  a  short  time,  and 
the  invaders  did  what  they  would  in  the  monstrous 

13 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

tropic  dusk.  Many  of  the  native  women  were  stabbed 
quickly;  but  the  youngest  ones,  and  Mary  Bradford, 
were  dragged  off  as  captives.  Mr.  Bradford  was  killed 
in  the  beginning — not  by  the  enemy,  who  were  busy 
despatching  Ngawa's  subjects,  but  by  Ngawa's  chief 
medicine-man,  who  stole  out  of  the  shadows,  slit 
his  throat  twice  across,  caught  the  blood  in  a  cup, 
and  then  slid  back  into  the  darkness.  The  boy  who 
brought  them  the  story  averred  that  he  had  seen  it 
all,  having  been  present,  though  somehow  left  out  of 
the  meUe.  The  enemy,  afraid  of  Ngawa's  return,  did 
not  stop  for  the  half-grown  children.  The  white  girl 
tore  away,  the  boy  said,  and  started  back  to  her 
father,  but  the  warrior  who  held  her  hit  her  on  the 
head,  so  that  she  dropped,  and  then  carried  her  off. 
Oh  yes,  he  had  seen  it  all  quite  well :  he  had  climbed 
into  a  tree.  The  huts  were  all  burning,  and  it  was 
lighter  than  day.  Ngawa  came  back  that  night,  and, 
later,  they  destroyed  utterly  the  villages  of  the  other 
tribe,  but  they  got  back  no  captives.  These  had  been 
killed  at  once,  probably,  or  sold.  Ngawa  had  gone 
back  to  the  medicine-men. 

Ngawa's  people  must  have  been  gentler  than  most 
14 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

of  their  color,  for  the  boy  answered  all  the  questions 
of  the  stricken  missionaries  before  he  asked  to  hear 
the  piano. 

This  was  absolutely  all  that  Saxe  knew,  when  he 
stumbled  into  my  rooms  and  asked  me  to  go  out  to 
Africa  with  him.  The  first  cablegrams  had  simply 
announced  the  massacre,  and  it  was  only  on  receipt 
of  letters  from  the  Prices  that  Saxe  learned  about 
Mary  and  her  horrible,  shadowy  chance  of  life.  The 
Prices  promised  to  cable  any  news,  but  it  was  un 
likely  that  they  would  have  any  more.  The  boy  who 
had  brought  them  this  story  drifted  down  the  coast, 
and  for  some  months  few  boats  came  down  the 
stream.  Ngawa,  they  heard  vaguely,  had  died,  and 
his  son  reigned  in  his  stead,  a  bitter  disciple  of  un 
clean  rites.  Young  Adams,  in  the  pity  of  his  heart, 
had  gone  the  hundred  miles  to  the  village,  but  the 
people  had  evidently  nothing  to  tell.  The  white  priest 
was  dead,  and  the  white  girl  was  gone.  Their  own 
captives  were  gone,  too,  and  if  they  had  been  able 
to  recover  them  would  they  not  have  done  it?  Un 
doubtedly,  they  were  killed,  but  their  enemies  had 
been  punished.  No:  they  were  faithful  to  their  own 

15 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

gods.  What  had  the  white  god  done  for  his  priest, 
or  for  Ngawa,  who  had  listened — and  died?  Doubt 
less  Adams  would  have  been  killed,  if  they  had  been 
defeated  in  the  war,  but  he  profited  by  the  mag 
nanimity  of  triumph.  It  was  astonishing  how  little 
impression,  except  on  Ngawa  and  one  old  medicine 
man,  James  Bradford  had  made.  Save  that  he  had 
achieved  martyrdom  for  himself,  he  might  as  well 
have  stayed  peacefully  at  the  Mission.  It  is  all,  from 
first  to  last,  a  story  of  vain  oblations.  The  people 
were  inclined  to  forget  that  he  had  ever  been  there, 
but  they  registered  their  opinion  that  his  white 
brother  had  better  go  back  at  once.  Saxe's  face,  as 
Adams  gave  him  this  last  news,  was  tense.  He  gripped 
the  hand  of  the  one  white  man  who  had  visited  that 
bitter  scene,  as  if  he  would  never  let  it  go. 

If  Saxe  had  been  delayed  in  America,  it  was  only 
in  order  to  arrange  his  affairs  so  that  he  could  stay 
away  indefinitely.  He  intended  to  follow  Mary  Brad 
ford  down  those  dim  and  bloody  trails  until  at  least 
he  should  have  seen  some  witness  of  her  death.  Saxe 
was  not  rich,  and  his  arrangements  took  him  a 
certain  length  of  time.  We  sailed  from  New  York 

16 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

in  March,  and  caught  the  African  liner  at  Plym 
outh. 

I  will  not  enter  upon  the  details  of  Saxe's  activity 
during  the  next  months,  nor  of  the  results  he  gained. 
It  was  a  case  where  governments  were  of  no  use :  the 
jungle  that  had  swallowed  up  Mary  Bradford  ac 
knowledged  no  suzerain  across  the  seas.  Saxe  visited 
Ngawa's  village,  of  course — "I  am  steel  proof,"  he 
said,  and  I  think  he  believed  it.  The  story  of  those 
months  is  a  senseless  story  of  perishing  lights  and 
clues  of  twisted  sand.  We  spent  three  months  in  res 
cuing  the  yellow  widow  of  a  Portuguese  pearl-fisher, 
who  had  been  captured  by  coast  pirates  and  sold 
inland.  When  Saxe  stood  face  to  face  with  the  "white 
woman"  he  had  worked  blindly  to  deliver,  he  reeled 
before  her.  "Tell  him  that  I  will  marry  him,"  said 
the  woman  with  a  noble  gesture.  She  was  forty,  fat, 
and  hideous.  I  mention  the  incident — which  turned 
me  quite  sick,  and  in  which,  to  this  day,  I  can  see 
nothing  humorous — simply  to  show  the  maddening 
nature  of  our  task.  Even  I  had  believed  that  this 
mysterious  white  woman  was  Mary  Bradford.  In 
that  land  of  rumor  and  superstition  and  ignorance 

17 


VAIN   OBLATIONS 

and  cunning — above  all,  of  savage  indifference — 
anything  might  be  true,  and  anything  might  be  false. 
Three  days  after  we  had  started  off  to  find  the  Por 
tuguese  hag,  a  real  clue  came  into  the  Mission.  Our 
three  months  had  been  quite  lost,  for  the  Prices  could 
get  no  word  to  us  on  our  knight-errant  task.  Poor 
Saxe! 

In  September,  Saxe,  following  this  clue,  which 
seemed  to  bear  some  real  relation  to  the  events  of 
the  year  before,  travelled  solemnly,  accompanied  by 
a  few  natives  only,  into  the  heart  of  that  hinterland 
which  stood,  to  all  the  coast  above  and  below  the 
Mission,  for  treachery,  mystery,  and  death.  In  Oc 
tober,  he  reached  the  village  of  the  chief  in  question 
— a  sun-smitten  kraal,  caught  between  high  blue 
mountains  and  the  nasty  bit  of  jungle  that  separated 
them  from  one  of  the  big  waterways  of  Africa.  Poli 
tics  are  largely  a  matter  of  geography,  and  his  posi 
tion  was  one  of  enviable  independence,  though  he 
was  to  the  neighboring  kings  on  the  scale  of  Andorra 
to  France  and  Spain.  He  was  a  greedy  old  man,  and 
the  sight  of  several  pounds  of  beads  made  him  very 
communicative.  Half  of  his  information  was  bound, 

18 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

by  African  code,  to  be  false,  and  Saxe  had  no  means 
of  knowing  which  half;  but  he  owned  to  having  pur 
chased,  a  few  months  before,  from  a  wandering 
trader,  a  slave  woman  of  white  blood.  She  had  come 
high,  he  affirmed,  cocking  his  eye  at  Saxe.  But  she 
was  not  Saxe's  slave — Saxe  had  put  it  in  that  way  in 
order  to  be  remotely  intelligible  to  the  savage  mind. 
Oh,  no !  she  was  the  daughter  of  a  Mandingo  woman 
and  an  Arab.  The  trader  had  told  him  that:  he  had 
known  the  mother.  Oh,  no!  it  could  not  be  Saxe's 
slave.  However,  he  was  walling,  for  a  really  good 
price,  to  consider  selling  her.  Saxe  refused  to  be 
discouraged.  The  clue  had  seemed  to  him  trust 
worthy;  and  the  story  about  the  Mandingo  woman 
might  be  pure  invention — bravado,  to  raise  the 
price. 

He  asked  to  see  her.  Oh,  certainly;  before  pur 
chasing  he  should  see  her.  But  meanwhile  there  was 
the  official  cheer  to  taste — kava,  above  all,  inimitably 
mixed — and  she  should  be  fetched.  Where  was  she? 
A  young  slave  girl  suggested  sardonically  that  she 
was  probably  at  her  toilet.  Since  she  had  heard  of 
the  white  man's  coming — Saxe  had  tactfully  sent  a 

19 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

runner  ahead  of  him — she  had  been  smearing  herself 
meticulously  with  ochre  and  other  precious  pigments. 
This  was  said  with  a  sidelong  glance  at  the  chief: 
obviously,  he  distributed  those  precious  pigments 
only  to  his  favorites.  Saxe  said  that  from  that  mo 
ment  his  heart  misgave  him.  He  had  been  somehow 
sure  that  this  woman  was  Mary.  Why  his  heart 
should  have  misgiven  him,  I  do  not  know;  or  what 
devil  of  stupidity  put  it  into  his  head  that  this  was 
the  trick  of  a  half-breed  slave  to  make  herself  irre 
sistible  to  a  white  man.  It  sounded  to  him,  he  said, 
like  the  inspiration  that  would  naturally  occur  to 
the  daughter  of  an  Arab  by  a  Mandingo  woman.  It 
has  never  sounded  to  me  in  the  least  like  that.  He 
said  that  he  still  believed  it  was  Mary;  but  I  fancy 
he  believed  it  after  the  fashion  of  the  doubter  who 
shouts  his  creed  a  little  louder.  Of  course  there  was 
something  preposterous  in  the  idea  of  Mary  Brad 
ford's  making  herself  barbarically  chic  with  ochre  to 
greet  the  lover  who  might  be  coming  to  rescue  her. 
But  was  not  the  whole  thing  preposterous  to  the 
point  of  incredibility?  And  Mary  Bradford  was  not 
an  ordinary  woman — not  the  yellow  widow  of  a 

20 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

Portuguese  pearl-fisher.  It  has  always  seemed  to  me 
that  poor  Saxe  ought  to  have  realized  that. 

Saxe  consumed  kava  until  he  could  consume  no 
more.  Then  the  slave  girl  announced  that  the  woman 
had  been  found.  Saxe  rose  to  his  feet.  He  was  stifling 
in  the  great  hut,  where  all  the  chief  councillors  had 
joined  them  at  their  feast,  where  the  reek  from 
greased  bodies  seemed  to  mount  visibly  into  the 
twilight  of  the  great  conical  roof.  His  head  was 
reeling,  and  his  heart  was  beating  weakly,  crazily, 
against  his  ribs — "as  if  it  wanted  to  come  out,"  he 
said.  His  hands  were  ice-cold.  He  had  just  presence 
of  mind  enough  to  drag  the  black  interpreter  out 
with  him,  and  to  leave  one  of  his  own  men  inside 
to  watch  the  stuff  with  which  he  proposed  to  pay. 
The  chief  and  most  of  his  councillors  remained 
within. 

Outside  the  hut,  her  back  to  the  setting  sun,  stood 
the  woman.  Saxe  had  of  course  known  that  Mary 
would  be  dressed  like  a  native;  but  this  figure  stag 
gered  him.  She  was  half  naked,  after  the  fashion  of 
the  tribe,  a  long  petticoat  being  her  only  garment. 
Undoubtedly  her  skin  had  been  originally  fair,  Saxe 

21 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

said;  but  it  was  tanned  to  a  deep  brown — virtually 
bronzed.  For  that  matter,  there  was  hardly  an  inch 
of  her  that  was  not  tattooed  or  painted.  Some  great 
design,  crudely  smeared  in  with  thick  strokes  of 
ochre,  covered  her  throat,  shoulders,  and  breast. 
Over  it  were  hung  rows  and  rows  of  shells,  the  long 
est  rows  reaching  to  the  top  of  the  petticoat.  Her 
face  was  oddly  marred — uncivilized,  you  might  say 
"'  — by  a  large  nose-ring,  and  a  metal  disk  that  was 
set  in  the  lower  lip,  distending  it.  Forehead  and 
cheeks  were  streaked  with  paint,  and  her  straight 
black  hair  was  dressed  after  the  tribal  fashion:  stif 
fened  with  grease,  braided  with  shells,  puffed  out 
with  wooden  rolls  to  enormous  size.  Her  eyelids 
were  painted  red.  That  was  not  a  habit  of  the  tribe, 
and  might  point  to  an  Arab  tradition.  The  painted 
eyelids  and  the  streaks  that  seemed  to  elongate  the 
eyes  themselves  were  Saxe's  despair — he  had  counted 
on  meeting  the  eyes  of  Mary  Bradford.  To  his  con 
sternation,  the  woman  stood  absolutely  silent,  her 
eyes  bent  on  the  ground,  her  face  in  shadow.  Even 
Saxe,  who  had  no  psychology,  seems  to  have  seen 
.that  Mary  Bradford  would,  in  that  plight — if  it  was 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

she — wait  for  him  to  speak  first.  But  I  think  he  had 
expected  her  at  least  to  faint.  Saxe  looked  at  her  long 
without  speaking.  He  was  trying,  he  said,  to  pene 
trate  her  detestable  disguise,  to  find  some  vulner 
able  point  where  he  could  strike  at  her  very  heart, 
and  know.  In  the  midst  of  his  bewilderment,  he  grew 
cool — cold,  even.  He  gave  himself  orders  (he  told  me 
afterward)  as  a  general  might  send  them  from  the 
rear.  His  tongue,  his  hands,  his  feet  were  very  far 
off,  but  they  obeyed  punctiliously.  My  own  opinion 
is  that  Saxe  never,  from  the  moment  when  he  saw 
the  woman,  believed  it  to  be  Mary. 

Her  back,  as  I  have  said,  was  against  the  light. 
As  the  purchaser  of  a  slave,  he  might  well  wish  to 
see  her  more  fully  revealed.  He  gave  the  order 
through  the  interpreter:  "Turn  to  the  light."  As  she 
turned  obediently  and  stood  in  profile  against  the 
scarlet  west,  he  saw  that  her  form  was  unshapely. 
On  her  back  were  a  few  scars,  long  since  healed. 

That  moment  was  undoubtedly  Hell  for  Saxe, 
in  spite  of  the  doubt  upon  him.  But  what  must  it 
have  been  for  the  impassible  creature  before  him? 
Saxe  saw  that  he  must  play  the  game  alone.  "Mary," 

23 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

he  said  quietly  in  English,  "I  have  come  to  take 
you  home."  In  the  circumstances,  it  was  the  stupid 
est  thing  he  could  have  said;  but  the  only  thing  he 
thought  of  was  speaking  in  English.  If  it  was  Mary, 
those  words,  he  thought,  would  reach  her,  would 
dispel  her  shame,  or,  if  she  were  mad,  pierce  her 
madness. 

She  seemed  not  to  have  heard.  "Bid  her  look  me  in 
the  face,"  he  said  brutally  to  the  interpreter.  The 
order  was  repeated.  She  turned,  raised  her  painted 
eyelids,  and  looked  him  straight  in  the  eyes,  with  the 
apathetic  look  of  the  slave,  the  world  over.  "But 
were  they  Mary  Bradford's  eyes?"  I  cried  to  him, 
when  he  told  me.  "I  don't  know,  damn  you!"  he 
said.  "Mary  had  never  looked  at  me  like  that — as 
if  she  didn't  see  me,  and  painted  like  a  devil." 

He  seems  to  have  felt — as  far  as  I  can  define  his 
feeling — that  she  was  not  Mary,  but  that  perhaps 
he  could  bully  her  into  being  Mary.  I  do  not  know 
how  else  to  explain  his  unconvinced  but  perfectly 
dogged  insistence  on  her  identity.  He  had,  of  course, 
been  greatly  shaken  by  the  extraordinary  appear 
ance  of  the  woman.  Perhaps  he  was  simply  afraid  it 

24 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

was  she  because  it  would  be  so  terrible  if  it  were, 
and  was  resolved  not  to  shirk.  Saxe,  too,  was  a  New 
Englander.  At  all  events,  he  shouted  his  creed  a  lit 
tle  louder  still.  "You  are  treating  me  very  badly, 
Mary.  I  am  going  in  to  buy  you  from  the  chief;  and 
then  you  will  listen  to  me." 

The  woman  heard  Saxe's  voice  and  looked  at  the 
interpreter.  Saxe,  stupefied,  repeated  his  speech  to 
the  negro,  and  the  latter  translated.  At  this,  she 
threw  up  her  arms  and  broke  into  guttural  ejacula 
tions.  That  painted  form  swayed  grotesquely  from 
side  to  side,  Saxe  said,  and  she  tore  the  shells  out 
of  her  hair,  tearing  the  hair  with  them.  Giving  him 
one  glance  of  devilish  hatred,  she  ran  to  the  chief's 
hut.  Saxe  followed.  There  was  nothing  else  to  do. 

Then  began,  Saxe  said,  what  for  him  was  a  hor 
rible  pantomime.  He  heard  nothing  of  what  was  said, 
until  afterward,  for  the  interpreter  could  not  keep 
up  with  the  prestissimo  of  that  scene;  but  one  under 
stood  it  without  knowing.  The  woman  grovelled  at 
the  chief's  feet;  she  pointed  to  Saxe  and  wrung  her 
hands.  She  was  not  Saxe's  slave,  and  evidently  did 
not  wish  to  be.  The  other  women  drew  near  to  lis- 

25 


VAIN   OBLATIONS 

ten,  being,  clearly,  personally  interested  in  the  out 
come.  The  chief  was,  as  I  have  said,  avaricious.  He 
looked  longingly  at  the  shining  heaps  of  beads,  the 
bolts  of  scarlet  cloth,  above  all,  the  Remington 
rifles.  Yet  it  was  clear  that  he  had  not  wholly  out 
grown  his  sluggish  penchant  for  the  woman  who  clung 
to  him.  It  does  not  often  happen,  for  that  matter, 
that  a  petty  chief  in  the  remote  interior  can  count  a 
white  woman — even  a  half-breed — among  his  slaves; 
and  the  male  savage  has  an  instinct  for  mating 
above  him.  The  woman  saw  whither  the  avaricious 
eye  wandered.  She  rose  from  the  ground,  she  stood 
between  him  and  the  treasures,  she  bent  over  him 
and  murmured  to  him,  she  pointed  to  her  own  dis 
torted  form.  .  .  .  The  little  slave  girl  scowled,  and 
the  chief's  eye  gleamed.  What  at  first  had  seemed  a 
possible  detriment,  now  showed  as  an  advantage. 
"That  was  true,"  he  exclaimed.  "Before  long  she 
would  bring  him  a  warrior  son  or  a  girl  he  could 
sell  for  many  cows.  Let  the  white  man  wait."  Saxe 
stamped  his  foot.  Not  one  day  would  he  wait:  the 
bargain  should  be  completed  then.  He  told  me  after 
ward  that,  after  seeing  her  with  the  chief,  he  was 

26 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

absolutely  convinced  that  the  woman  they  were 
cheapening  was  the  half-breed  Arab  they  said  she 
was;  and  the  general  in  the  rear  of  the  battle  won 
dered  dully  what  he  should  do  with  her.  But  the 
woman  had  thrust  herself  cunningly  beneath  the 
chief's  very  feet,  had  twined  her  arms  about  his 
ankles,  had  welded  herself  to  him  like  a  footstool 
that  he  could  not  shake  off.  Over  the  chief's  thick 
features,  in  the  torch  light  (for  night  was  falling  out 
side),  into  his  avaricious  eyes,  crept  a  swinish  gleam. 
Let  the  white  man  wait  until  to-morrow.  Night  was 
falling;  it  was  time  to  sleep.  By  the  sunlight  they 
could  deal  better.  The  woman  panted  heavily  be 
neath  his  feet,  never  loosing  her  hold.  The  young 
slave  girl  looked  down  at  her  with  unconcealed  ma 
lignity.  Saxe  found  himself  forced  to  retire  from  the 
royal  hut — sleeping-chamber,  banqueting-hall,  audi 
ence-room  in  one.  He  said  that  all  he  thought  of,  as 
he  stumbled  out,  was  the  idiotic  figure  he  should 
make  at  the  Mission  as  the  owner  of  an  Arab- 
Mandingo  woman.  It  was  worse  than  the  yellow 
Portuguese. 

He  was  conducted  to  his  tent.  The  interpreter 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

confirmed  there  all  that  Saxe  had  divined.  Let  it  be 
said  now  that  Saxe  had  one  clear  inspiration.  Before 
leaving  the  hut,  he  had  turned  and  spoken  to  the 
woman  who  was  fawning  on  the  wretched  negro. 
"Mary,"  he  said,  "if  you  ask  me  to,  I  will  shoot 
you  straight  through  the  heart."  The  woman  had 
snarled  unintelligibly  at  the  sound  of  his  voice,  and 
had  redoubled  her  caresses.  Can  you  blame  Saxe  for 
having  doubted?  Remember  that  she  had  not  for  one 
moment  given  any  sign  of  being  Mary  Bradford; 
remember  that  he  had  no  proof  that  it  was  Mary 
Bradford.  "Had  you  no  intuition  of  her?"  asked 
young  Adams,  later,  at  the  Mission.  "Intuition!" 
cried  Saxe.  "There  wasn't  a  feature  of  Mary  Brad 
ford  there:  she  was  a  loathsome  horror."  Let  those 
who  cannot  believe  in  Saxe's  failure  to  recognize  her, 
reflect  for  an  instant  on  all  that  is  contained  in  that 
literal  statement.  Have  you  never  failed,  after  a  few 
years  of  separation,  to  recognize  some  one:  some  one 
whose  face  had  not  been  subjected  to  barbaric  dec 
oration  and  disfigurement,  not  even  to  three  years 
of  the  African  sun;  who,  living  all  the  while  in  the 
same  quiet  street,  had  merely  passed  for  a  time 

28 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

under  the  skilful  transforming  hands  of  sorrow?  I 
have  seen  Mary  Bradford's  photograph,  and  was  told 
at  the  same  time  that  the  not  very  striking  face  de 
pended  for  its  individuality  on  the  expression  of  eyes 
and  mouth.  But  painted  eyes  .  .  .  and  a  lip-ring? 
She  was  undoubtedly,  as  Saxe  said,  "a  loathsome 
horror";  and  a  loathsome  horror  who  gave  no  sign. 
I  firmly  believe  that  she  was  not  recognizable  to  the 
eye.  Saxe's  only  chance  would  have  lain  in  divina 
tion;  in  being  able  to  say  unerringly  of  the  woman 
he  loved:  "Thus,  or  thus,  in  given  circumstances, 
would  she  behave."  Such  knowledge  of  Mary  Brad 
ford  could  never  have  been  easy  to  any  man.  In 
my  opinion,  no  one  can  blame  him  for  doubting. 
The  magnificence  of  the  performance  was  almost 
outside  the  realm  of  possibility.  I  asked  Saxe  once 
if  Mary  Bradford  had  been  good  at  acting.  He  had 
never  seen  her  do  but  one  part:  she  had  done  that 
extremely  well.  And  the  part?  Beatrice,  in  Much 
Ado.  Beatrice! 

The  strain  of  it  had  told  on  Saxe,  and  he  slept  that 
night.  But  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that,  before  he  slept, 
he  had  quite  made  up  his  mind  that  he  was  as  far 

29 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

away  from  Mary  Bradford  as  he  had  ever  been.  It  is 
not  to  be  wondered  at.  Only  a  man  who  had  grasped 
Mary  Bradford's  idea — it  has  taken  me  three  years 
to  do  that,  entirely — could  have  believed  that  she 
would  let  Saxe  go  out  baffled  from  the  hut  in  which 
she  deliberately  chose  to  stay  with  her  half-drunk, 
wholly  vile  captor.  Women  who  could  have  done  all 
the  rest,  would  have  turned  at  Saxe's  offer  of  a  kindly 
shot  through  the  heart.  But  Mary  Bradford  was 
great.  She  was  also  infinitely  wronged  by  Fate.  It 
is  all  wanton,  wanton — to  the  very  last:  all,  that 
is,  except  her  own  part,  which  was  sublimely  rea 
soned. 

Saxe  slept,  I  say;  and  at  dawn  woke  to  his  prob 
lem.  The  intelligence  that  works  for  us  while  we 
sleep  waked  him  into  the  conviction  that  he  must, 
at  any  cost,  buy  the  woman.  He  said  that,  as  he 
strode  over  to  the  chief's  hut,  he  was  thinking  only 
of  what  price  he  ought  to  put  on  the  child  that 
would  be  such  a  fantastic  mixture  of  breeds.  He  did 
not  want  the  woman,  but  he  felt  that  the  purchase 
was  inevitable.  This,  I  am  convinced,  was  only  the 
New  English  leaven  working  him  up  to  martyrdom. 

30 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

It  would  be  unmitigatedly  dreadful  to  have  the 
woman  on  his  hands,  and  therefore  he  ought  prob 
ably  to  buy  her. 

The  chief  greeted  him  with  temper,  and  soon 
Saxe  learned  why.  The  woman  had  left  the  hut 
before  dawn,  taking  with  her  her  master's  largest 
knife.  She  was  found  later  in  her  own  little  hovel, 
dead,  with  a  clean  stab  to  her  heart.  Suicide  is  vir 
tually  unknown  among  savages,  and  the  village  was 
astir.  Saxe  asked  to  see  the  body  at  once,  but  that,  it 
seems,  was  not  etiquette:  he  had  to  wait  until  it 
was  prepared  for  burial.  For  an  instant,  he  said,  he 
thought  of  bargaining  for  the  body,  but  forebore. 
He  had  a  difficult  return  journey  to  make,  and  the 
point  was,  after  all,  to  see  it.  When  they  permitted 
him  to  enter  the  hut,  the  face  had  been  piously  dis 
figured  beyond  recognition.  He  told  me  that  he  lifted 
the  tattooed  hand  and  kissed  it:  he  did  not  know 
why.  It  w^as  clear  that  if  the  woman  had — prepos 
terously — been  Mary,  she  would  not  have  wished 
it;  and  if  she  were  the  other,  it  was  almost  indecent. 
But  he  could  not  help  it.  This  impulse  of  his  seems 
to  have  been  his  only  recognition  of  Mary  Bradford. 

31 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

In  life  and  in  death,  she  suppressed  every  sign  of 
herself  with  consummate  art. 

We  were  a  fevered  group  that  waited  for  Saxe  day 
after  day  at  the  Mission;  and  he  seemed  to  have  been 
gone  an  intolerably  long  time.  The  broken  leg  that 
had  kept  me  from  going  with  him  was  almost  well 
when  he  returned.  Yet  he  had  taken  the  shortest 
way  back.  It  was  also  the  unhealthiest.  He  said  that 
he  had  heard  war  rumors  that  made  him  avoid  the 
more  frequented  trail,  but  I  fancy  he  rather  hoped 
that  the  swamps  he  clung  to  would  give  him  fever. 
In  that  sense — and  in  that  sense  only — Saxe  could 
perhaps  be  said  to  have  committed  suicide.  He  stum 
bled  into  the  Mission  dining-room  at  noon  one  day. 
"And  Mary?"  we  all  cried,  rising.  "Oh,  did  you  ex 
pect  to  see  Mary?"  he  asked  politely,  but  with  evi 
dent  astonishment. 

We  got  him  to  bed  at  once.  After  the  days  of  de 
lirium  were  over,  he  told  his  story  quite  simply.  It 
was  pitifully  short.  The  concrete  facts  seemed  to  be 
perfectly  clear  in  his  mind,  and  he  gave  them  spon 
taneously;  but  what  he  himself  had  felt  during  that 
dramatic  hour,  I  learned  only  by  close  questioning. 

32 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

He  died  suddenly,  when  he  was  apparently  conva 
lescent.  The  year  he  had  been  through  had  simply 
killed  resiliency  in  him  and  he  went  down  at  the 
last  as  stupidly  as  a  ninepin.  I  cannot  imagine  the 
source  of  the  rumor  that  he  had  killed  himself ,  unless 
it  was  some  person  who  thought  he  ought  to  have 
done  so.  He  started,  at  the  end,  to  speak  to  me:  "If 
Mary  ever — "  He  never  got  beyond  the  three  words; 
they  showed  sufficiently,  however,  that  he  was  con 
sidering  the  possibility  of  Mary  Bradford's  being 
discovered  after  his  death.  He  may  have  been  wan 
dering  a  little  at  the  last;  but,  in  my  opinion,  Saxe 
had  never  believed,  even  after  the  suicide,  that  the 
woman  he  had  seen  had  been  his  betrothed. 

Some  weeks  after  Saxe's  death,  we  received  in 
controvertible  proof — if  testimony  is  ever  incontro 
vertible — that  it  had  indeed  been  she.  We  had  been 
surrounded  for  a  year  by  a  hideous  jungle — blind, 
hostile,  impenetrable.  Now  out  of  that  jungle  stalked 
a  simple  fact.  One  of  the  native  girls  who  had  been 
taken  captive  with  Mary  Bradford  returned  at 
length  to  her  own  tribe.  She  had  shared  Mary's  for 
tunes,  as  it  happened,  almost  to  the  last;  then  the 

33 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

chief  who  had  bought  them  both  sold  her,  and  by 
the  successive  chances  of  purchase,  raid,  and  battle 
she  had  reached  her  own  people.  It  was  hardly  more 
than  crawling  home  to  die;  but  she  managed  to  send 
word  by  one  of  her  kinsmen  to  the  white  people  down 
the  river.  Apparently  she  and  Mary  had  promised 
each  other  to  report  if  either  should  ever  reach  friends 
again.  Her  message  was  pitifully  meagre:  Mary  had 
talked  little  in  those  wild  months;  and  after  she  had 
seen  that  they  were  too  well  watched  to  escape,  she 
had  talked  not  at  all.  But  the  two  had  evidently 
clung  together — an  extraordinary  tie,  which  was  the 
last  Mary  Bradford  was  to  know  of  friendship.  The 
burden  of  the  native's  report  was  that  the  white 
girl  was  the  favorite  of  a  chief  who  gave  her  much 
finery.  The  dying  woman  seems  to  have  thought  it 
would  set  Mary  Bradford's  friends  at  rest — her  kins 
man,  I  remember,  said  that  he  had  good  news  for 
us.  The  news  was  no  news  to  me — I  had  been  think 
ing;  but  I  was  glad  that  Saxe  had  died  before  he 
could  hear  it.  Even  the  comfort  of  knowing  that 
Mary  was  surely  dead  would  never  have  made  up 
to  him  for  the  ironic  memory  of  the  last  hour  he 

34 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

had  spent  with  her.  Besides,  Saxe  would  never  have 
understood. 

I  should  probably  never  have  touched  this  chapter 
of  history  with  a  public  pen,  if  I  had  not  heard  a 
woman  say,  a  few  months  since,  that  she  thought 
Mary  Bradford's  conduct  indelicate.  Had  the  wom 
an  not  said  it  to  me  directly,  I  should  not  have 
believed,  even  at  my  cynical  age,  that  such  a  thing 
could  be  said.  I  greatly  regret,  myself,  that  the 
facts  were  ever  told:  they  should  have  been  buried 
in  Africa  with  Saxe.  But  the  Prices  returned  to 
America  not  long  after  it  all  happened,  and  appar 
ently  could  not  refrain  from  talking.  Even  so,  I 
should  have  let  Mary  Bradford's  legend  alone,  for 
ever,  had  I  not  learned  that  she  could  be  misjudged. 

Consider  dispassionately  the  elements  of  her 
situation;  and  tell  me  who  has  ever  been  so  tor 
tured.  Physically  unable  to  escape  by  flight,  mor 
ally  incapable,  as  you  might  say,  of  escaping  by 
death — for  there  can  be  no  doubt  that,  difficult  as 
suicide  would  have  been  to  a  guarded  captive,  she 
could  have  found  some  poisonous  root,  courted  the 
bite  of  some  serpent,  snatched  for  one  instant  some 

35 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

pointed  weapon;  and  that  she  was  deterred,  as 
Saxe  said,  by  the  simple  belief  that  to  take  one's 
life  was  the  unpardonable  sin  against  the  Holy 
Ghost,  the  Comforter — she  could  but  take  what 
came.  As  a  high-priced  chattel,  she  was  probably 
not,  for  the  most  part,  ill-treated — save  for  the 
tattooing,  which  was  not  cruelly  intended.  The 
few  scars  that  Saxe  noted  doubtless  bore  witness  to 
her  protest  against  the  utmost  bitterness  of  slavery, 
some  sudden  saint-like  frenzy  with  which  she  op 
posed  profanation.  She  may  have  wondered  why 
God  chose  so  to  degrade  her:  her  conduct  with 
Saxe  shows  beyond  a  doubt  how  she  rated  her 
degradation.  She  made  not  one  attempt  to  dignify 
or  to  defend  her  afflicted  body.  Her  soul  despised 
it:  trampled  it  under  foot. 

What  Mary  Bradford  suffered  before  Saxe  came 
we  cannot  know,  but  the  measure  of  it  lies,  I 
think,  in  the  resolution  she  took  (if  we  believe  the 
jealous  slave  girl)  when  she  heard  of  the  white  man's 
approach.  She  must  have  divined  Saxe,  leagues 
away,  as  he  was  unable  to  divine  her,  face  to  face. 
Her  one  intent  was  to  deceive  him,  to  steep  her- 

36 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

self  in  unrecognizable  savagery.  If  Mary  Brad 
ford  had  conceived  of  any  role  possible  for  herself  in 
her  own  world,  she  would  not  have  created  her  great 
part.  If  she  had  felt  herself  fit  even  to  care  for 
lepers  at  Molokai,  she  would  have  washed  away  her 
paint  and  fallen  at  his  feet.  It  is  perfectly  evident 
that  she  considered  herself  fit  for  nothing  in  life — 
hardly  for  death.  Her  hope  was  clearly  that  Saxe 
should  not  know  her.  I  do  not  believe  that  it  was 
pride.  If  there  had  been  any  pride  left  in  Mary 
Bradford's  heart,  she  could  not  have  stood  quietly 
("apathetically,"  was  his  word!)  before  Saxe  in  the 
flare  of  the  dying  sun.  It  was  not  to  save  anything 
of  hers  that  she  went  through  her  comedy,  but  only 
to  save  a  little  merciful  blindness  for  Saxe  himself. 
He  undoubtedly  made  it  as  hard  as  possible  for 
her.  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  if  he  had  gone 
away  at  once,  she  would  be  living  still — mothering 
her  half-breed  child,  teaching  it  secretly  the  fear  of 
God.  When  she  saw  that  all  Saxe's  bewilderment 
still  left  him  with  the  firm  determination  to  buy 
her — to  take  her  away  and  study  her  at  his  leisure 
— she  conceived  her  magnificent  chute  de  rideau. 

37 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

When  she  went  into  the  hut,  she  had  decided,  for 
Saxe's  sake,  to  die.  Mary  Bradford  grovelling  at  the 
feet  of  the  drunken  chief  will  always  seem  to  me 
one  of  the  most  remarkable  figures  in  history:  I 
should  never  have  mentioned  Jocasta  in  the  same 
breath  with  her.  Only  Christianity  can  give  us 
tragedy  like  that.  How  must  she  not  have  longed, 
at  Saxe's  offer  of  a  kindly  shot  through  the  heart,  to 
turn,  to  fling  herself  at  his  feet,  to  cry  out  his  name, 
once.  She  "redoubled  her  caresses,"  Saxe  said!  Has 
any  man  ever  been  so  loved,  do  you  think?  For  the 
sake  of  bestowing  upon  him  that  healing  doubt,  she 
let  him  go,  she  put  off  death,  she  spent  her  last 
night  on  earth  not  fifty  yards  from  him,  in  the  hut 
of  a  savage,  that  she  might  have,  before  dawn,  the 
means  of  committing  the  unpardonable  sin.  Note 
that  she  did  not  commit  suicide  until  she  had  made 
it  perfectly  plausible — from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
Arab-Mandingo  woman.  She  proved  to  him  that  it 
was  not  she.  She  gauged  Saxe  perfectly.  Nothing  but 
some  such  evidence  as  later  we  received — perhaps 
not  even  that — would  ever  have  made  Saxe  believe 
that  Mary  Bradford,  with  him  by  her  side,  had  clung 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

to  that  vile  savage.  Even  Mary  Bradford — whose 
soul  must  have  been,  by  that  time,  far  away  from  her 
body,  a  mere  voice  in  her  own  ears,  a  remote  coun 
sellor  to  hands  and  feet — could  not  have  done  that, 
had  she  not  intended  to  die.  But  remember  that 
up  to  that  day  she  had  lived  rather  than  rank  her 
self  with  the  "violenti  contro  se  stessi."  We  can 
simply  say  that  Mary  Bradford  chose  the  chance 
of  Hell  for  the  sake  of  sparing  Saxe  pain.  The  fact 
that  you  or  I — I  pass  over  the  lady  who  thinks  her 
indelicate;  does  she  think,  I  wonder,  that  it  would 
have  been  delicate  for  Mary  Bradford  to  accom 
pany  Saxe  back  to  civilization? — may  believe  her 
to  be  one  of  the  saints,  has  nothing  to  do  with  what 
she  thought.  Mary  Bradford  came  of  a  race  that 
for  many  generations  believed  in  predestination; 
but  she  herself  believed  in  free  will.  Dreadful  as 
it  is  to  be  foredamned,  it  is  worse  to  have  damned 
yourself.  She  had  not  even  the  cold  comfort  of 
Calvinism.  I  said  that  I  understood  Mary  Brad 
ford.  I  am  not  sure  that  it  would  not  have  taken 
a  Spanish  saint  of  the  sixteenth  century  really  to 
understand  her.  Sixteenth-century  Spain  is  the 

39 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

only  thing  I  know  of  that  is  in  the  least  like  New 
England. 

I  am  not  trying  to  make  out  a  "case"  for  Mary 
Bradford;  and  I  sincerely  hope  that  the  lady  who 
thinks  her  indelicate  will  never  read  these  pages. 
For  most  people,  the  facts  will  suffice,  and  I  have 
no  desire  to  interpret  them  for  the  others.  You  have 
only  to  meditate  for  a  little  on  the  ironic  and  tragic 
reflections  of  a  hundred  kinds  that  must  have  surged 
through  Mary  Bradford's  brain,  to  be  swept  away, 
yourself,  on  the  horrid  current.  Do  I  need,  for 
example,  to  point  out  the  difficulty — to  use  a  word 
that  I  think  the  lady  I  have  cited  would  approve — 
of  merely  meeting  the  man  she  adored,  face  to  face? 
For  never  doubt  that  those  souls  who  live  least  by 
the  flesh  feel  themselves  most  defiled  by  its  defile 
ment.  No,  you  have  only  to  explore  Mary  Brad 
ford's  tragedy  for  yourself.  It  will  take  you  three 
years,  perhaps,  as  it  has  taken  me,  to  penetrate  the 
last  recesses.  And  if  you  are  tempted  for  a  moment 
to  think  of  her  as  mad,  or  exaltie,  reflect  on  how 
completely  she  understood  Saxe.  I  am  only  half  a 
New  Englander;  and  I  confess  that,  though  I  rev- 

40 


VAIN    OBLATIONS 

erence  her  heroism,  I  am  even  more  humble  be 
fore  her  intelligence.  It  is  no  blame  to  Saxe  that 
he  stumbled  out  of  the  chief's  hut,  completely  her 
dupe.  Poor  Saxe!  But  the  vivid  vision  of  that 
scene  leaves  Phedre  tasteless  to  me.  As  I  say,  I  am 
only  half  a  New  Englander.  .  .  . 


41 


THE  MANGO-SEED 


THE  MANGO-SEED 

1HE  two  young  men  looked  at  each  other  rather 
helplessly.  Then  "Marty"  Martin  drew  a  few  ragged 
words  over  his  helplessness.  "I'm  sorry,  Peter — 
really,  awfully.  I'll  be  back  in  an  hour.  And  do  buck 
up.  But  you  have  bucked  up,  you  really  have.  You 
look  ever  so  much  better  than  you  did  when  we  went 
to  lunch.  And  I'll  be  back.  Oh,  you  can  depend  on 
me."  He  drifted  off  through  the  door.  His  muscles 
were  tense  with  haste,  but  he  fingered  chairs  and  ta 
bles  as  he  went — as  if  trying  to  put  clogs  of  decency 
on  feet  indecorously  winged.  Even  so,  he  was  soon 
out  of  sight,  and  Peter  Wayne  was  alone. 

"There's  no  point  in  saying  it  isn't  rum,  because  it 
is,"  he  murmured  to  himself.  "And  here,"  he  added, 
looking  about.  There  was  no  moral  support  in  those 
crimson  walls,  those  great  pier-glasses,  those  insig 
nificant  writing-tables  with  red-shaded  electric  lights, 
those  uncomfortable  tapestried  armchairs.  It  wasn't 

45 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

the  setting  to  help  you  through  a  crisis.  He  was  in  the 
quietest  corner  of  the  most  essentially  respectable 
hotel  in  New  York.  There  were  plenty  of  them — 
scores — that  were  incidentally  respectable;  but  at 
the  St.  Justin  respectability  had  been  cherished 
through  years  for  its  own  sake,  as  more  important 
than  the  register,  the  cuisine,  or  the  unimpeachable 
location  that  no  metropolitan  progress  could  render 
inconvenient.  As  a  very  young  bachelor  with  vir 
tually  no  family  ties,  he  was  not  familiar  with  the 
St.  Justin.  It  wasn't  a  place  where  you  would  ex 
pect  to  get  the  kind  of  thing  his  kind  of  human 
being  wanted.  He  couldn't,  for  example,  have  in 
duced  Marty  to  lunch  there.  They  had  lunched  at 
Plon's.  It  was  a  hotel  where  you  might  be  per 
fectly  sure  your  grandparents  had  stopped.  It  was 
natural  that  his  mother  should  have  selected  it  for 
their  meeting,  as  she  hadn't  been  in  America  for 
well  over  twenty  years.  But  there  was  less  backing 
than  he  had  expected,  somehow. 

Sitting  uncomfortably  in  one  of  the  corners  by  a 
writing-table  (his  back  to  the  window  so  that  the  fa 
miliar  streets  shouldn't  lure  him  too  much  to  flight), 

46 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

he  took  the  privilege  of  the  consciously  crucial  mo 
ment.  He  reviewed  his  life.  It  was  so  very  short, 
after  all,  that  it  was  easily  reviewed.  He  was  only  a 
few  months  out  of  the  university,  and  he  was  just 
twenty-two.  The  insoluble  was  there  to  the  point 
of  being  either  romantic  or  absurd,  he  didn't  know 
which.  He  had  what  so  many  young  people  long  for  in 
vain,  a  mystery.  He  had  amused  himself  occasionally 
with  monstrous  hypotheses.  But  what  real  account 
could  he  give  of  himself?  What  account,  that  is,  of 
the  sort  that  Marty  Martin  and  his  like  had  by  heart 
before  they  could  spell?  The  most  that  he  knew 
about  his  parents — except  that  they  were  alive  and  in 
the  tropics — was  that  they  banked  in  Honolulu  and 
had  some  natural  hold  or  other  on  Marty  Martin's 
uncle.  Marty  Martin's  uncle  had  picked  out  Peter's 
school  and  his  college  for  him,  and  was  telegraphed 
for  when  Peter  had  appendicitis.  That  was  as  near 
the  parental  relation  as  anything  he  had  known  from 
experience.  Lonely?  Well,  any  fellow  was  lonely 
when  the  other  fellows  all  went  trooping  home  for 
holidays;  but  loneliness  he  had  always  frankly  diag 
nosed  as  three-quarters  pride.  The  fellows  were  al- 

47 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

ways  glad  to  get  back  to  school  or  college,  he  no 
ticed.  In  any  case,  he  had  stopped  thinking  about 
it  much — his  plight.  That  saved  his  dignity.  What 
he  sat  now  vaguely  dreading  was  the  immense,  the 
cataclysmic  downfall  of  his  dignity.  He  tried  to  put 
the  facts  to  himself  so  simply  that  they  should  be  as 
reassuring  as  a  primer.  Ollendorf ,  he  had  once  com 
plained  to  a  teacher,  would  take  the  zest  out  of  a 
murder,  the  sense  out  of  a  scandal.  Tragedy  was  a 
verbal  matter.  Put  a  crime  into  any  foreign  language, 
and  it  sounded  like  a  laundry  list.  He  would  try,  as 
it  were,  to  find  the  French  for  his  situation. 

"Oh,  rot!"  he  began,  taking  his  own  advice  quite 
seriously.  "It  isn't  so  Sudermannish  as  all  that.  My 
father  and  my  mother  chose  to  go  to  the  tropics  to 
live,  a  year  after  I  was  born.  They  did  not  take  me 
with  them.  They  have  never  sent  for  me;  but  they 
have  supported  me;  they  have  written  to  me  occa 
sionally;  they  have  got  Marty  Martin's  uncle  to  keep 
me  out  of  the  hands  of  the  S.  P.  C.  C.,  and  trained 
me  generally  to  do  without  them.  I've  never  been 
invited  to  go  to  Tahiti.  And  Tahiti  isn't  like  London 
— if  you  know  any  one  there,  you  can't  go  without  an 

48 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

invitation.  They  can't  have  turned  against  me,  when 
I  was  eleven  months  old,  on  account  of  my  vices.  I've 
kept  pretty  jolly  and  managed  to  regularize  the  situ 
ation  with  my  friends.  Now  my  mother  has  written 
that  she's  coming  to  America  to  see  me.  Indeed,  she 
has  actually  come.  I  wasn't  allowed  to  meet  her  at  a 
steamer,  decently.  I  have  to  meet  her  here — here." 
(He  looked  gloomily  around  at  the  conventional 
walls.)  "Yet  she  doesn't  seem  to  be  staying  here.  I 
don't  know  whether  she  will  want  tea,  or  where  to 
take  her  to  dinner.  I  don't  know  her  when  I  see  her.  I 
don't  know — oh,  hang  it,  I  don't  know  anything! 
And  if  I  could  funk  it,  like  Marty,  I  would.  But  what 
can  you  do  when  a  lady  takes  the  trouble  to  bring 
you  into  the  world?  If  it  had  been  my  father,  now,  I 
wouldn't — I  positively  wouldn't — have  consented  to 
meet  him.  It's — it's  no  way  to  treat  a  fellow." 

His  vain  attempt  at  Ollendorfian  flatness  broke 
down:  the  mere  facts  seemed  so  very  much  against 
him.  He  had  often  complained  to  Marty  Martin  that 
it  was  dashed  awkward,  this  being  the  only  original 
changeling;  but,  in  point  of  fact,  he  had  never  been 
so  uncomfortable  in  his  life  as  now,  at  the  prospect 

49 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

of  playing  the  authentic  filial  role.  "I'll  make  her 
dine  here,"  he  muttered.  He  could  think  of  nothing 
worse  without  being  actually  disrespectful.  An  old 
lady  in  a  gray  shawl  walked  slowly  down  the  hall 
past  the  door,  and  it  suddenly  struck  him  that  his 
mother  would  perhaps  like  to  dine  at  the  St.  Justin. 
"I  ought  to  have  cabled  to  ask  what  color  her  shawl 
would  be,"  he  began,  in  a  flippant  whisper,  to  himself. 
The  flippant  whisper  stopped.  He  was  much  too  gen 
uinely  nervous  to  be  flippant  any  longer  without  an 
audience.  At  the  same  time,  he  found  himself 
wondering — oh,  insincerely,  theatrically,  rhetorically 
wondering — why  he  had  not  bought  an  etiquette 
book.  There  was  something — well,  to  be  honest, 
something  like  an  extra  gland  in  his  throat,  some 
thing  like  a  knot  in  his  healthy  young  nerves — that 
kept  him  from  putting  the  question  to  himself  au 
dibly.  "If  she  cries — "  he  reflected,  with  anticipatory 
vindictiveness.  What  he  really  meant  was:  "If  she 
makes  me  so  much  as  sniff."  For  your  mother  was 
really  the  one  person  in  the  world  who  had  you  nec 
essarily  at  a  disadvantage.  Even  if  you  hadn't  the 
habit  of  her,  you  couldn't  count  on  yourself  for  ret- 

50 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

icence.  You  might  be  as  bored  as  possible,  but  that 
wouldn't  save  you.  There  might  be  treacheries  of  the 
flesh,  disloyalties  of  the  cuticle — all  manner  of  re 
versions  to  embryonic  helplessness.  She  somehow  had 
your  nerves,  your  physical  equilibrium,  at  her  mercy. 
Old  Stein,  prodding  at  you  with  instruments  in  the 
psychological  laboratory,  was  a  mere  joke  in  com 
parison.  Even  the  most  deceived,  the  most  docile  and 
voluble  student  ended  respectably  in  a  card  cata 
logue.  Peter  felt  suddenly  an  immense  tenderness  for 
the  decencies,  the  unrealities  of  "science."  But  to 
meet  your  mother  in  conditions  like  these  was  the 
real  thing:  the  naked  horror  of  revelation.  "It's  lit 
erature,"  thought  Peter  to  himself,  "and  what  is  lit 
erature  but  just  the  very  worst  life  can  do?  "  He  came 
back  to  his  familiar  conclusive  summary.  It  was  rum. 
The  next  quarter  of  an  hour  passed  more  merci 
fully.  The  mere  empty  lapse  of  time  helped  him,  half 
duped  him  into  thinking  that  the  scene  might  not 
come  off  at  all.  It  was  foolish  to  be  there  ahead  of 
time,  but  what  could  a  man  in  his  predicament  do, 
or  pretend  to  do,  between  luncheon  and  an  interview 
like  that?  They  had  had,  he  and  Marty,  a  civilized 

51 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

ineal  at  PlonV,  but  he  had  not  been  hungry,  and  to 
smoke  among  the  stunted  box-trees  afterward  had 
been — well,  impossible.  They  had  got  to  the  St. 
Justin  ridiculously  early,  and  then  Marty  had  bolted. 
Peter  didn't  bear  him  any  grudge  for  that;  of  course 
it  was  perfectly  proper  for  Marty  to  bolt.  It  would 
have  been  worse,  he  began  to  think,  to  face  her  first 
before  a  witness. 

By  this  time  he  had  accepted  the  smallest  writing- 
room  of  the  St.  Justin  as  the  predestined  scene  of 
the  great  encounter;  accepted  it  as,  perhaps  divinely, 
perhaps  diabolically,  but  at  all  events  supernatural- 
ly,  appointed.  These  walls  had  been  decorated  by 
dead  people  to  be  unsympathetic  and  grossly  unfit 
witnesses  of  Peter  Wayne's  embarrassment.  To  that 
extent  they  belonged  to  him.  The  sudden  superstition 
was  genuine;  so  genuine  that  he  found  himself  resent 
ing  a  bit  of  chatter  that  sprang  up  outside  the  door 
and,  even  more,  the  immediate  quick  entrance  into 
the  writing-room  of  one  of  the  chatterers.  Why  hadn't 
his  mother  given  him  an  appointment  in  her  own 
sitting-room,  at  her  own  hotel — whatever  that  might 
be?  He  didn't  know;  he  knew  nothing  of  her  since 

52 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

the  wireless  message  that  had  made  the  appoint 
ment;  and  of  course  since  she  was  managing  the  thing 
that  way,  he  hadn't  even  tried  to  meet  her  at  her 
steamer,  though  it  had  actually  docked  at  some  un 
earthly  hour  that  morning.  But  she  was  likely  to 
pay,  too,  for  her  perversity,  since  the  lady  who  had 
just  come  in  and  had  sat  down  rather  aimlessly  at 
one  of  the  tables  would  probably  annoy  her  as  much 
as  she  did  him.  He  had  owned — or  pretended? — 
to  Marty  Martin  a  furtive  curiosity  as  to  this  mother 
of  his,  whom  he  had  virtually  never  seen,  of  whom  he 
hadn't  so  much  as  a  photograph.  Now  something 
quite  different  stirred  within  him :  the  instinct  to  pro 
tect  her  against  anything  she  would  not  like.  He 
suddenly  saw  her  frail  and  weary  and  overwrought 
and  quite  old — pathetically,  not  ironically,  like  the 
little  old  lady  who  had  hobbled  past  the  door — and 
he  resented  any  detail  that  might  crown  her  long 
effort  at  reunion  with  an  extra  thorn.  He  was  sure  she 
would  hate  this  other  woman's  being  there — the 
younger  woman  who  had  just  come  in,  and  sat  down 
so  nonchalantly. 

This  lady  obviously  intended  to  stop  long  enough 
53 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

for  their  discomfiture,  since — just  here  he  got  up  and 
looked  at  his  watch  as  he  did  so — it  lacked  scarce  two 
minutes  of  the  appointed  hour.  He  looked  at  the  in 
truder  a  little  impatiently.  She  wasn't  writing.  Per 
haps  he  could  suggest,  by  some  flicker  of  expression, 
some  implication  of  gesture,  that  he  wasn't  there  in 
that  ridiculous  galley  for  nothing,  and  still  less  there 
for  casual  company.  She  was  slim  and  smartly  veiled 
and  outrageously  made  up.  That  was  all  he  saw  out 
of  the  corner  of  his  eye,  but  it  was  enough  to  make 
him  feel  that  she  had  no  such  rights  at  the  St.  Justin 
as  a  reunited  mother  and  child.  She  wasn't  waiting 
for  a  parent,  he  knew;  only  for  some  frivolous  friend 
or  other.  He  was  so  nervous  as  to  wonder  if  there 
were  any  conceivable  way  in  which  one  could  ask 
her  to  go  into  one  of  the  other  rooms.  A  depopulated 
chain  of  them  stretched  down  the  corridor.  He  threw 
another  glance  at  her.  She  was  well  dressed.  Peter, 
though  he  might  know  as  little  as  a  poodle  about 
the  nature  of  the  current  fashion,  could,  like  most 
men,  pounce  unerringly  on  the  unfashionable.  Her 
exuberance  wasn't  a  matter  of  gewgaws;  it  was  all 
in  the  meretricious  harmonies  of  her  features  and 

54 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

complexion.  And  yet — Peter  caught  himself  away 
from  staring,  as  he  passed  her,  but  one  glance  was 
enough  to  show  him  that — it  was  a  perfectly  honest 
mask;  her  paint  and  powder  were  as  respectable  as 
blue  glasses.  Again  he  knew  it  unerringly.  He  was 
glad  to  recognize  it.  For  at  that  moment  he  became 
so  nervous  that  he  did,  without  a  qualm,  the  most 
preposterous  thing  he  had  ever  done,  even  at  two 
and  twenty. 

His  mother  was  imminent;  he  knew  it  in  a  hundred 
ways.  The  atmosphere  was  charged  with  more  than 
the  mere  prospect,  was  charged  with  the  actual  cer 
tainty  of  her.  He  found  that  he  was  going  to  put  it  to 
the  lady  who  sat  there.  He  stood  in  the  door  of  the 
writing-room  and  looked  down  the  dark  hall.  It  was 
empty,  save  for  a  woman  who  sat  humbly  near, 
bonneted,  veiled,  faithfully  clasping  some  kind  of 
bag — obviously  a  servant.  Remembering  the  bit  of 
chatter,  he  fancied  it  the  maid  of  the  intruding  lady. 
No  one  else  was  in  sight.  Yet  somehow  he  knew  that 
his  mother  would  be  on  time:  the  crispness  of  her 
earlier  cablegrams  promised  it.  The  lady  really  must 
go  elsewhere,  and  the  maid — old  and  "colored"  and 

55 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

manifestly  respectable — must  move  down  the  hall 
and  sit  outside  another  door.  He  went  back,  and  this 
time  walked  straight  across  to  the  stranger. 

"Will  you  pardon  me,  madam"  ("madam"  was  a 
deplorable  word,  but  the  powder  somehow  demanded 
an  extravagant  formality),  "if  I  speak  to  you,  to  ask 
you  something  very  odd?" 

She  stared  at  him  through  her  fantastically  pat 
terned  veil. 

"  I  have  been  put  in  the  position  of  having  to  meet 
an  elderly  lady — a  near  relative — here  for  a  more  or 
less  intimate  conversation.  I  don't  think  she  realized, 
in  making  the  appointment,  how  little  privacy  you 
have  a  right  to  in  a  hotel.  It  is  very  long  since  she 
has  been  in  a  great  city.  Will  you  pardon  the — the 
really  unpardonable — liberty  of  my  asking  if  you 
are  likely  to  be  here  much  longer?  I  mean — ought  I 
to  arrange  to  take  her  elsewhere  in  the  hotel  when 
she  comes?  She  will  be  here  in  a  moment." 

It  was  a  dreadful  thing  to  have  had  to  do,  and,  if 
he  judged  by  what  the  veil  showed  of  the  lady's  face, 
it  couldn't  have  been  worse  done.  She  looked  dis 
mayed.  Peter  was  angry :  so  angry  that  he  managed 

56 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

to  stop  just  where  he  had  stationed  himself  before 
her;  so  angry  that  he  didn't  deprecate,  that  he  sim 
ply  set  his  teeth  and  waited.  There  was  nothing  he 
could  do  now,  he  felt,  to  convince  her  that  she  hadn't 
been  insulted. 

She  lifted  her  veil  ever  so  little,  just  freeing  her 
lips,  slightly  constricted  by  its  tight-drawn  mesh. 
As  she  did  so,  she  both  rose  and  spoke. 

"Aren't  you  Peter  Wayne?" 

He  bowed,  relieved.  If  they  had  a  ground  of  ac 
quaintance,  he  could  perhaps  cover  it  all  up,  make 
it  plausible,  get  rid  of  her  on  some  dishonest,  hilari 
ous  pretext.  "I  am."  He  waited;  there  was  no  use  in 
pretending  that  he  remembered  her. 

The  veil  was  lifted  farther,  then  a  hand  was  laid  on 
his  shoulder  and  a  voice  sounded  in  his  astonished 
ears.  "Turn  to  the  light,  my  son,  and  let  me  look  at 
you.  I've  not  had  a  photograph,  you  remember,  since 
you  were  a  child." 

Even  as  he  faced  the  light,  he  was  saying  to  himself 
that  it  was  rummer  than  ever;  but  it  was  rummest 
when  he  turned  for  his  legitimate  look  at  her.  She 
was  older  than  he  had  assumed  the  strange  lady  to 

57 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

be;  but  she  was  a  long  way  from  the  little  old  lady  in 
the  gray  shawl.  This  was  his  mother,  and  it  was  over 
— he  felt  it  as  those  sinking  for  the  third  time  may 
feel.  In  another  instant  he  saw  his  mistake.  He  had 
been  pulled  up  out  of  the  surge  into  the  terrible  air — 
this  was  his  mother,  and  it  had  just  begun !  He  mas 
tered  his  breath — his  breath  that  under  the  water 
had  been  playing  tricks  with  him.  He  looked  her 
over,  searching  stare  for  searching  stare.  Her  fair 
hair  had  lost  what  must  once  have  been  a  golden 
lustre,  but  it  was  carefully,  elaborately  arranged, 
waved,  curled,  braided.  It  was  as  fashionable  as  her 
clothes.  The  white  mask  of  powder  left  clear  the  con 
tour  of  the  fine,  thin  nose  but  cloaked  the  subtler 
modellings  of  the  face.  The  blue  eyes,  idle  yet  intent, 
looked  at  him  from  behind  it;  below  them  it  was 
rent,  once,  by  the  scarlet  stab  of  the  mouth.  Peter 
remembered  vaguely  having  heard  that  the  tropical 
sun  necessitated  such  protection.  It  was  the  north 
ern  dimness  and  drizzle  that  turned  make-up  into  a 
moral  question.  Even  for  the  grands  boulevards,  to  be 
sure,  Mrs.  Wayne's  make-up  would  have  been  over 
done.  This  was  the  chief  result  of  his  searching  stare. 

58 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

She  wasn't  like  one's  mother  at  all,  confound  it! — 
not  like  any  one's  mother.  He  would  have  been  glad 
of  a  little  more  sophistication  than  even  at  wise 
two-and-twenty  he  was  conscious  of  possessing. 

"Your  maid?"  he  asked,  remembering  the  figure 
outside  the  door. 

"Oh,  yes;  my  old  Frances.  She  recalls  you  as  a 
baby.  She'll  want  to  see  you.  You  must  speak  to  her 
before  we  go." 

"But  you're  not  going " 

"I  find  I'd  better  get  off  to-night.  I've  learned 
since  landing,  that  if  I  do,  I  can  just  get  a  boat  at 
Vancouver.  It's  not  as  if  I  had  any  business  to  do. 
You'll  take  me  to  dinner  somewhere — some  restau 
rant.  I  don't  like  hotels." 

"But — you  don't  mean  you've  come  for  only 
twenty-four  hours — across  all  that?" 

The  straight  red  mouth  elongated  itself  into  a 
smile.  "If  there  weren't  so  much  of  it  to  cross,  I 
could,  perhaps,  stay  longer.  I  came  only  to  say  one 
or  two  things." 

She  spoke  as  if  she  had  run  up  from  her  country 
place  for  the  day.  Peter  suddenly  revolted  against 

59 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

this  careless  treatment  of  his  plight.  He  was  glad  if 
his  prayers  had  succeeded  in  averting  tragedy.  At 
the  same  time,  he  didn't  intend  to  be  turned  into 
farce.  He  hadn't  let  himself  in  for  all  this  only  to  be 
shirked  as  he  had  been  shirked  for  more  than  twenty 
years.  He  meant  to  know  things,  hang  it!  He  had 
been  afraid  of  a  scene;  afraid  of  twenty  years'  emo 
tion  expressed  in  an  hour;  of  a  creation  of  human 
ties  as  violent  and  sudden  as  the  growth  of  the  tree 
from  the  mango-seed  in  the  fakir's  hands.  "In  ten 
minutes  you  eat  the  ripe  mango,"  a  globe-trotting 
friend  had  told  him.  If  he  hadn't  the  fakir's  miracle 
to  fear,  well  and  good;  but  neither  was  he  going  to 
suffer  the  other  extreme,  the  complete  dehumanizing 
of  the  experience.  After  all,  she  was  his  mother, 
hang  it !  If  she  wasn't  going  to  make  him  pay — well, 
he  would  make  her  pay.  Somebody  had  to  get  some 
thing  out  of  so  preposterous  a  situation.  He  leaned 
forward. 

"Things  you  couldn't  write?  Or  have  you  just 
funked  it,  on  the  way?" 

"Funked  it?"  Her  vocabulary  apparently  did  not 
hold  the  word. 

60 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"  I  mean — oh,  I  mean,  let  us  talk  straight.  You've 
let  it  all  go  for  more  than  twenty  years.  Now  you 
take  it  all  up  again.  I'm  a  gentleman,  I  hope.  I 
didn't  bolt,  though  you  can  bet  I  wanted  to.  It 
would  have  been  easier  never  to  have  seen  you  at 
all." 

"You've  never  wanted  to  see  your  mother?" 

Peter  looked  out  of  the  window  into  the  familiar 
street.  If  it  hadn't  been  for  the  utter  detachment  of 
her  tone,  he  would  have  felt  that  she  was  hitting 
below  the  belt. 

"What  do  you  take  me  for?  I've  nearly  died  of — 
well,  call  it  interest,  more  times  than  I  can  count  up. 
No  little  boy  likes  to  have  no  mother;  likes  to  have 
his  mother  care  nothing  for  him.  But  I've  grown  per 
fectly  used  to  it.  And  I  know — I  know  now,  mind 
you — that  you  don't  care.  Well,  it  may  not  be  what 
I  should  have  chosen,  but  at  least  it  lets  me  out.  It's 
too  late,  now,  to  make  me  care." 

It  was  by  no  means  the  whole  truth.  But  it  was 
what  he  had  been  trying,  and  in  vain,  to  say  to  him 
self  an  hour  since  about  it  all.  There  was  some  tri 
umph  in  being  able  to  say  it  now  to  her. 

61 


THE   MANGO-SEED 

Her  blue  eyes  turned  on  him  a  stranger's  sudden 
kindness.  "Were  those  years  bad,  Peter?  I  thought 
they'd  be  less  bad  if  you  began  them  very  young. 
You  see,  they  had  to  begin  some  time." 

"Oh,  they  began — and  they  lasted.  Now,  they're 
not  bad  at  all.  So  why  rake  it  all  up  now?" 

If  she  had  been  little  and  old  and  shaking,  he 
couldn't  have  pressed  the  question,  he  knew.  The 
powdered  cheeks,  the  elaborate  hair,  the  vermilion 
lips  gave  him  a  kind  of  sanction.  There  was  a  pitiful 
way  of  wearing  rouge,  no  doubt;  this  wasn't  pitiful 
in  the  least.  He  didn't  know  what  she  looked  like 
underneath  the  mask,  but  he  could  almost  have 
sworn  she  didn't  need  it. 

"I'm  not  trying  to  do  that.  If  I've  come  so  late, 
it's  because  I  feel  quite  sure  that  it's  too  late  to  undo 
any  of  it.  I  am  not  trying" — her  brilliant,  dyed  smile 
was  extraordinarily  little  in  the  maternal  tradition 
— "to  get  a  single  claw  into  you.  I've  come  to  pay 
damages,  Peter,  not  to  claim  them.  But  you  must  be 
very,  very,  very  polite  to  me.  I'm  not  used  to  any 
thing  else.  And  America  rather  frightens  me." 

"I  don't  want  to  be  anything  but  polite,"  mur- 
62 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

mured  Peter,  abashed.  "And  the  freer  you  really  are, 
the  more  it's  up  to  you  to  play  the  game,  don't  you 
think?" 

She  smiled  vaguely,  and  he  saw  at  once  that  she 
belonged  to  the  generation  that  preceded  slangy  par 
adox.  She  might  almost  have  worn  a  fluffy  gray 
shawl. 

"I  am  sure  you  don't  wish  to  be  anything  but 
polite,"  she  brought  out,  still  vaguely.  "But — I've 
odd  things  to  say,  and  I've  come  a  long  way  to  say 
them;  and  you,  my  son,  must  listen." 

"It's  what  I'm  here  for." 

"  Evidemmeni.  How  much  has  Spencer  Martin  told 
you?" 

"Old  Martin?  Nothing  at  all,  ever — except  the 
figure  of  my  allowance." 

"Not  why  we  first  went  to  Hawaii?" 

"Good  Lord,  no!  I  might  have  been  a  foundling." 

"You  didn't  ask?"  She  had  taken  off  her  gray 
glove;  and  pushed  her  veil  up  farther  on  her  fore 
head,  with  beautiful  white  fingers. 

"No,"  answered  Peter  curtly.  "A  fellow  wouldn't 
ask.  You  can  see  that." 

63 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

She  seemed  to  muse.  "He  would  have  told  you 
that,  I  think,  if  you  had.  There  was  no  reason  why 
you  shouldn't  know." 

"I  naturally  supposed,  if  there  was  no  reason  why 
I  shouldn't  know,  you'd  have  seen  to  it  that  I  was 
told." 

"So  you  thought  there  was  something  disgraceful 
— something  that  drove  us  out  of  America?" 

"It  has  occurred  to  me.  But  I  never  let  myself 
worry  about  it.  And  old  Martin  himself  was  a  kind  of 
proof  that  there  wasn't." 

"There  wasn't."  She  echoed  his  words  in  a  dis 
dainful,  emphatically  affirmative  tone.  "No,  Peter, 
not  that."  She  paused  for  a  moment,  staring  out  into 
the  gray  street.  "  These  women  are  very  ugly,  aren't 
they?"  she  asked  irrelevantly.  "On  the  boat,  they 
were  horrors.  And  they  jerked  about  so — did  so 
many  things.  Do  the  men  like  them  that  way?"  Her 
tone  was  desultory. 

"I  suppose  so."  He  felt  a  mischievous  desire  to  tell 
her  how  little  the  men  he  knew  would  probably  like 
them  her  way;  but,  in  fact,  the  slow  conviction 
was  encroaching  on  his  mind — not  so  much  pene- 

64 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

trating  it  as  fluidically  enwrapping  it — that  she  was 
compounded  of  many  graces.  Her  gestures,  for  ex 
ample  :  they  were  all  slow,  and  each  showed  off  some 
thing,  if  only,  for  an  instant,  some  lesser,  some  negli 
gible  contour.  She  had  the  air  of  not  having  stirred  a 
limb  or  a  feature  for  years,  except  to  please,  and  of 
being  now  in  the  practice  infallible.  She  was  very 
feminine — no,  hang  it !  that  dairymaid  word  wouldn't 
do.  (Peter  had  been,  in  college,  the  proudest  product 
of  his  several  "theme-courses,"  and  the  quest  of  the 
epithet  was  not  unknown  to  him.)  She  was  very  sim 
ple  and  very  sophisticated.  He  had  to  leave  it  at  that. 

"I'll  tell  you  about  our  leaving  America.  You 
ought  to  have  known  long  since.  And  yet — perhaps 
it  was  better  your  sympathies  shouldn't  have  been 
touched.  If  you  thought  we  were  brutes,  that  would 
leave  you  free,  wouldn't  it?" 

"It  did." 

"Ah,  yes — exactly!"  She  seemed  to  triumph  for 
an  instant.  Then  she  looked  out  of  the  window  again, 
and  again  spoke  irrelevantly.  "Are  you  in  love?" 

Peter  frowned.  "No."  He  was  too  young  not  to  be 
stiff  about  it. 

65 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"That's  rather  a  pity.  I  could  have  explained 
better." 

"Oh,  I  know  what  it  stands  for." 

She  corrected  him  gently.  "It  'stands  for'  nothing 
whatever.  Either  you've  loved  or  you  haven't.  It 
might  have  helped  me — that's  all."  Then  she  seemed 
to  brace  herself  for  difficult  exposition. 

"Listen,  Peter.  You  must  know  this  first.  In  the 
months  just  following  your  birth,  everything  changed. 
Your  father  developed  tuberculosis — alarmingly,  it 
was  then  supposed.  That  meant  another  climate.  He 
owned  property  in  Honolulu.  It  occurred  to  him  to 
go  there.  In  not  taking  you  we  acted  on  physicians' 
advice.  There  was  no  telling  what  sort  of  life  we 
might  have  to  live.  You  were  best  off  here.  You  were 
under  expert  care,  and  in  those  days  we  had  news  of 
you  constantly.  I  am  quite  well  aware" — her  voice 
grew  surer  as  she  went  on;  she  seemed  less  fantas 
tically  feminine,  more  simply  human — "that  many 
women  would  have  chosen  differently.  For  me  there 
could  be  no  question.  You  had  been  brought  into 
the  world  in  the  belief  that  there  would  be  no  choice 
to  make.  We  never  dreamed,  when  you  were  born,  of 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

anything  but  the  normal  American  life.  I  insist  on 
your  realizing  that." 

Peter  bowed.  It  already  began  to  change  his  vision 
of  himself  a  little,  though  he  wasn't  sure  he  liked  his 
mystery  to  be  merely  tubercular.  Though  if  that  was 
all,  why  in  the  world — but  he  saw  that  he  could  only 
listen  and  wait. 

"Then — Honolulu  didn't  serve  very  long.  We  had 
to  go  farther  away  from  life.  Now  we're  in  Tahiti. 
It's — it's  a  very  wonderful  climate." 

Mrs.  Wayne  rose,  drew  the  crimson  curtain  to  one 
side,  and  looked  out.  It  was  a  moment  before  she 
spoke,  and  as  she  spoke  she  sat  down  again  with 
helpless  grace. 

"I  find  it  very  hard  to  tell.  I  don't  think  I  can 
tell  you  it  all." 

"I  don't  see  why  you  should  have  come  at  all, 
unless  you  are  going  to  tell  me  everything  there  is 
to  tell.  But  if  you've  really  funked  it,  I  don't  care, 
you  know."  Thus  Peter,  maintaining  his  bravado. 

"You  don't  help  me  out."  The  blue  eyes  rested  on 
him  critically.  "But  I  suppose  it's  not  your  fault. 

Since  you  don't  know  anything  about  anything " 

67 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"I  can't  give  you  a  leg  up.  No." 

She  frowned  a  little,  as  if  troubled  by  his  phrasing, 
but  resigned  herself  to  it.  "No;  you  can't  give  me  a 
leg  up." 

"I  say — "  He  leaned  forward  with  a  sudden  im 
pulse.  "Why  don't  I  go  back  with  you?  Or  come  out 
later?  Lots  of  people  going  to  Tahiti  now,  you  know, 
since  they've  exhausted  the  Spanish  Main.  Plenty  of 
attractions :  drives  round  the  island,  perfect  scenery, 
native  customs  on  tap — ordeal  by  fire  and  hot  stones. 
It's  in  the  advertisements  along  with  the  rates  and 
sailings.  No  reason  why  I  shouldn't  come." 

She  had  drawn  back  while  he  spoke  with  a  per 
fectly  obvious  terror.  With  parted  lips,  and  coiled 
hair,  and  her  very  blood  (it  seemed)  turned  white, 
she  looked  like  Greek  tragic  masks  that  he  had  seen 
in  museums.  These  he  had  always  thought  grinning 
prevarications;  now,  he  acknowledged  their  authen 
ticity.  His  jauntiness  faded  into  a  stare.  Then  she 
pulled  herself  together,  as  Peter  would  have  said,  by 
slow,  difficult  degrees,  like  a  kaleidoscope  turned  too 
slowly — pitiful  to  see. 

"No,  Peter,  you  must  never  come  to  Tahiti.  He — 
he  couldn't  bear  it." 

68 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"He?" 

"Your  father." 

"Oh — my  father."  His  imagination  had  not  yet 
evoked  his  father.  "I  had  forgotten  him,  for  the 
moment." 

"Forgotten  him!  What  extraordinary  things  you 
say!" 

"Well,  why  shouldn't  I  forget  him?  He  hasn't  even 
taken  the  trouble  to  spend  twenty-four  hours  in 
America  to  make  my  acquaintance."  Something 
acrid  had  risen  in  the  cup,  and  Peter's  lips  were  bitter. 

Her  white  fingers  moved  again  to  the  folds  of  her 
veil,  as  if  the  frail  mesh  weighed  intolerably  upon  her 
brows. 

"If  you  forget  him,  of  course  I  can  never  explain. 
He  is  all  there  is."  She  indulged  then  in  an  ap 
praising  glance.  "You  look  kind  and  good.  I  didn't 
think  you  would  be  undutiful." 

Undutiful!  It  was  her  turn  to  introduce  an  un 
familiar  vocabulary.  "Undutiful!"  Peter  repeated. 
"What  do  you  mean?  That  I'm  expected  to  be  grate 
ful  to  him  for  being  my  father?" 

She  smiled.  She  lifted  her  hands.  She  all  but  ap 
plauded  him.  "Yes,  just  that!" 

69 


THE   MANGO-SEED 

Peter  stared.  He  had  two  favorite  words  with 
which  to  describe  the  legitimately  surprising.  One  of 
them  was  "rum."  But  such  an  idea  as  this  called  for 
the  other.  It  was — positively — "rococo." 

She  went  on  then.  Apparently  his  ironic  question 
had  smitten  the  rock,  for  the  fluent  tale  gushed 
forth,  watering  all  the  arid  past.  But  to  Peter  it  was 
as  if  a  man  blinded  and  drenched  with  spray  should 
try  to  drink  of  it.  The  first  sentences  came  too 
quickly.  In  all  his  two  and  twenty  years  they  found 
no  context.  He  had  still  to  learn  the  way  of  them.  He 
supposed  it  was  because  he  was  finding  out  at  last 
what  it  was  to  have  a  real  mother. 

"It  wasn't  always  Tahiti,"  he  heard  her  saying 
after  a  little.  "We've  tried  everything  south  of  the 
equator,  I've  sometimes  thought.  Valparaiso,  for  a 
long  time.  Perhaps  you  knew?  Spencer  Martin " 

"Never  even  told  me  when  you  changed  your  con 
tinent."  He  was  blandly  bitter.  Somehow  it  did 
hurt,  as  she  went  on. 

"The  climate,"  Mrs.  Wayne  murmured  again. 
And  then  she  named  other  stages  of  their  progress — 
all  places,  Peter  reflected,  that  were  in  the  geogra- 

70 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

phies  and  in  Kipling,  and  nowhere  else.  It  made  his 
parents  sound  like  vagabonds  of  fiction.  Her  trailing 
narrative  did  not  add  to  their  reality.  The  details  she 
mentioned  were  wildly  exotic,  and  those  she  took  for 
granted  he  could  not  supply.  Her  careful  English  was 
interlarded  with  strange  scraps  of  Spanish  and  native 
names  for  things  which  left  the  objects,  for  him,  un 
recognizable.  He  made  nothing  out  of  it  except  that 
it  wasn't  what  he  should  call  a  life  at  all.  He  didn't 
even  see  whether  it  was  whim  or  necessity  that  con 
trolled  them.  As  soon  as  anything  in  her  story  be 
came  coherent  or  comprehensible,  she  doubled  on  her 
tracks.  At  first  he  threw  in  occasional  questions,  but 
the  answers  didn't  explain;  and  soon  he  stopped 
asking  them.  A  foreignness  like  that  left  his  very 
curiosities  unphraseable.  He  came  to  the  point  where 
he  didn't  even  know  what  it  was  that  he  wanted  to 
know.  There  was,  to  be  sure,  the  irregularly  recurrent 
stress  on  the  hope  of  health,  an  obsession,  apparently, 
under  which  they  had  faintly  struggled  and  madly 
rambled;  but  it  didn't  make  much  more  sense  than 
what  he  had  learned  in  childhood  about  Ponce  de 
Leon.  You  might  as  well  ask  a  firefly  to  show  you 

71 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

your  way.  Clearly,  she  hadn't  the  gift  of  biography. 
He  sat  very  still  and  intent,  trying  to  make  a  pattern 
out  of  it;  but  she  merely  succeeded  in  dazing  him. 
Then  suddenly,  when  he  was  most  bewildered,  it 
came  to  an  end,  ran  out  in  a  mere  confession  of 
failure. 

"And  nowhere,  at  any  time,  has  the  miracle  hap 
pened.  He  has  never  been  well  enough  to  come  back. 
We  have  always  had  to  stay  away." 

"It  must  have  been  a  strange  life,"  Peter  mused. 

"Strange?  It  may  be.  Strange  for  him,  no  doubt: 
so  fitted  for  civilization — for  your  world." 

"You  speak  as  if  it  weren't  yours." 

"Oh,  mine,"  she  said  simply;  "he  was  mine.  I 
don't  ask  for  more  civilization  than  that — than  my 
husband." 

It  was  the  most  sentimental  speech  that  Peter 
had  ever  heard  from  human  lips,  and  he  stared  in 
credulously.  But  incredulity  faded.  Her  tone  of  voice 
worked  on  him  even  after  she  fell  silent.  He  still  felt 
its  vibration  in  the  air  while  the  mask  shifted  subtly 
before  his  eyes.  Somehow,  as  she  sat  there,  breathing 
such  simple  passion  from  her  intricate  adornments, 

72 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

she  became  at  once  more  astounding  and  more  intel 
ligible.  One  saw  it  all — even  Peter,  in  his  young  and 
untutored  heart,  knew  infallibly.  She  had  loved  her 
husband  supremely,  and  she  had  chucked  everything 
for  him.  She  had  chucked  so  much,  in  fact,  that  she 
had  even  lost  all  sense  of  the  worth  of  what  she  had 
cast  away.  She  had  nothing  left  to  measure  it  by. 
Peter  felt  that  America  itself  was  a  good  deal  to  have 
chucked.  It  soothed  his  pride  a  little,  to  be  sure,  to 
have  her  treat  New  York  so  cavalierly.  She  hadn't  so 
much  as  looked  at  it;  and  she  had  circumnavigated 
the  globe  for  him.  It  was  clear,  too,  that  every  mo 
ment  of  the  journey  was  a  kind  of  torture  to  her.  Her 
very  look  round  the  room  divulged  an  agony  of 
strangeness  and  suspense.  She  was  just  longing  to  be 
back  on  her  island.  Peter  thrilled  a  little  foolishly  to 
it.  He  fancied  it  was  a  grande  passion.  The  only 
grande  passion  Peter  had  hitherto  known  had  been 
that  of  a  sophomore  friend  for  his  landlady's  daugh 
ter.  That,  though  it  had  been  enhanced  by  proper 
detail  of  elopement,  disinheritance,  and  threats  of  sui 
cide,  had  disappointed  them  all  in  the  end.  The  bride 
was  rather  silly  and  tried  to  borrow  money;  and 

73 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

when  Peter  and  Marty,  in  their  senior  year,  had  re 
read  Lawrence's  sonnet-sequence,  they  had  found 
that  it  didn't  scan.  But  this — this  was  different. 
Whatever  his  mother  had  undertaken,  she  had  ob 
viously  put  it  through.  After  all  those  years  of  mar 
riage,  to  have  your  voice  vibrate  like  that!  It  had 
never  occurred  to  Peter  that  a  fellow's  mother  could 
still  be  in  love  with  his  father.  Even  in  novels  moth 
ers  weren't.  As  for  life:  he  recalled  the  parents  that 
he  knew.  He  had  never  seen  another  woman  with  just 
that  look,  the  look  of  a  dedicated  being,  of  some  one 
whose  bloom  had  been,  first  and  last,  both  jealously 
hoarded  and  lavishly  spent.  She  was  like  a  woman 
out  of  a  harem:  a  million  graces  for  one  man,  but  a 
mere  veiled  bundle  to  all  the  rest.  That  was  the  secret 
of  her  uniqueness.  She  was  a  charming  woman  to 
whom  the  notion  of  charming  the  world  at  large 
would  be  blasphemous.  Her  mood  had  been  slowly 
orientalized  to  match  her  exterior,  which  had  grad 
ually  grown  exotic.  She  would  die  in  suttee.  Peter 
felt  her  quality  no  less  poignantly  because  his  words 
for  it  were  unsure.  Of  course  she  didn't  want  to  stay 
in  America!  Of  course  she  was  off  to  Vancouver 

74 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

at  midnight!  And  yet — why,  why  had  she  come? 
Would  she  never  explain? 

She  had  been  looking  out  of  the  window  while  he 
soliloquized — it  was  part  of  the  whole  sub-tropical 
spectacle  of  her  that  she  should  limit  herself  to  so 
few  hours,  and  then  be  as  languid  as  if  she  had  leased 
a  suite  at  the  St.  Justin  for  life.  She  turned  just  as 
Peter  had  made  up  his  mind  to  speak. 

"There  was  one  summer  when  you  wanted  to  go 
to  the  Caucasus,  I  remember — a  rather  queer  trip 
that  was  going  to  cost  a  great  deal.  We  were  sorry 
— I  was  dreadfully  sorry — that  you  couldn't  go." 

Peter  frowned.  There  you  were!  She  crammed  the 
supreme  interview  of  a  lifetime  into  an  hour,  and 
then  had  the  audacity  to  be  irrelevant. 

"  We  couldn't  afford  it  just  then.  It — it  was  a  very 
expensive  year.  I  had  to  tell  Spencer  we  couldn't.  I 
hope  you  didn't  hate  us  for  it." 

Peter  laughed.  "I  didn't  even  know  you  had  any 
thing  to  do  with  it.  Old  Martin  didn't  tell  me  it  was 
funds.  He  just  wet-blanketed  the  whole  thing — said 
it  wasn't  safe  and  he  couldn't  hear  of  it.  I  didn't 
mind  much.  I  went  to  Murray  Bay  to  visit  another 

75 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

chap.  But,  I  say — do  you  mean  old  Martin  asked 
you?" 

"He  cabled." 

"And  you?" 

"I  cabled  back." 

"Has  he  been  consulting  you  about  me  all  these 
years?  In  cases  like  that,  when  I  didn't  dream  of  it?" 

"Oh,  only  occasionally,"  she  hastened  to  say. 
"We  haven't  been  spying  on  you." 

"No,  I  should  hope  not."  Then  he  called  himself  a 
queer  duck,  aggrieved  for  twenty  years  because  he 
hadn't  been  spied  on,  and  now  aggrieved  at  the 
thought  that  he  might  be. 

*  *  Was  it  you,  by  the  way,"  he  asked,  "who  were 
interested  in  my  affairs,  or  my  father?"  Her  pro 
nouns  had  been  a  little  confusing. 

"Your  father  has  had,  more  and  more,  to  leave  all 
correspondence  to  me."  For  the  first  time,  her  words 
came  glibly.  She  had  evidently  packed  that  sentence 
in  her  trunk  before  starting. 

"Is  he  so  very  ill?"  Peter  had  veered  at  last  to  an 
interest  in  his  other  parent;  it  was  clear  that  his 
other  parent  was  the  real  clue  to  the  mystery. 

76 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"Oh,  horribly — horribly!"  It  was  almost  a  cry. 
She  bent  forward.  "So  ill,  Peter,  so  ill  that  you 
mustn't  come  now,  ever.  He  loathes  it  so — being  so 
ill.  And  he  is  so  very  proud — as  why  shouldn't  he 
be?  Can't  you  see  how  he  would  mind?  Do  you  think 
I'd  have  come  if  it  had  been  possible  to  send  for  you? 
Do  you  think  I'd  have  left  him  if  there  had  been  any 
other  way?  I'm  not  sure,  as  it  is,  that  I  ought  to  have 
come.  It  has  been  terrible,  to  be  getting  farther  away 
every  day;  to  know  that  I'm  as  far  away  from  him 
as  it  is  possible  to  be  on  this  earth.  And  think  what 
it  must  be  for  him,  alone — and  there!" 

Well,  she  was  as  pathetic  now  as  any  little  old 
lady  in  a  gray  shawl  could  be;  only  she  was,  some 
how,  tragic  too.  Her  face  was  like  the  white  grave  of 
beauty.  Peter  was  stupefied. 

"There?  "he  repeated. 

She  flung  out  her  hands.  "On  a  savage  island. 
Think  of  him  on  a  savage  island!" 

"I  can't,  very  well,"  murmured  Peter  inaudibly. 
Then:  "But  has  he  always  been  so  ill?  For  twenty 
years?  Or" — he  fixed  her  a  little  more  directly — 
"is  there  something  besides  illness?" 

77 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

She  did  not  answer.  She  rose  and  looked  out  of  the 
window,  and  as  Peter  rose  and  stood  beside  her,  she 
lifted  one  hand  to  his  shoulder.  There  was  something 
ineffably  gracious  in  the  gesture.  She  seemed  to  be 
making  it  all  up  to  him.  "Such  a  patched  life,  Peter," 
she  murmured.  "You  can't  blame  him  for  not  having 
wanted  me  to  come." 

"Oh,  he  didn't  want  you  to  come?" 

She  hesitated  for  an  instant.  "No.  And  now  I 
must  go." 

"Now?"  he  asked  stupidly. 

"  Oh,  yes,  at  once.  I  shan't  have  time  to  dine  with 
you."  She  looked  helplessly  about  for  a  scarf  that 
she  had  thrown  down. 

"But  no!"  Peter  broke  out.  "It's  preposterous. 
To  come  like  this  and  go  like  this!  Your  train  doesn't 
go  for  hours — if  you  will  go  to-night." 

"But  I  haven't  arranged  for  it.  I  haven't  packed." 

"Why,  you  haven't  unpacked!"  he  cried. 

"Oh,  I  think  Frances  may  have.  And  I  mustn't 
fail  to  get  off.  There  are  the  tickets  to  get,  too. 
Peter,  I  must  go."  She  spoke  as  if  to  delay  were  un 
speakable  treason;  and,  as  she  spoke,  she  turned  to 
cross  the  room  to  the  door. 

78 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

"I  say,"  said  Peter,  standing  squarely  in  her  way, 
"why  did  you  come?  You  shan't  go  without  telling 
ine  that."  It  wasn't  the  way  to  speak  to  one's  mother, 
but  she  had  chosen  to  discard  the  maternal  code. 

She  broke  off  in  the  act  of  withdrawal  and  turned 
to  him.  Her  blue  eyes  were  tearless  but  very  sad. 
"I  loved  you  dearly  when  you  were  very  little,"  she 
said  simply.  "I've  never  quite  forgotten  that.  I  sud 
denly  realized  that,  if  I  waited  any  longer,  I  could 
never  come.  I  think  it  was  a  cruel  and  foolish  thing 
for  me  to  do,  and  I'm  a  little  ashamed  of  it;  but — 
kiss  me,  Peter." 

Before  he  obeyed,  he  clutched  at  one  more  straw. 
"You  won't  see  old  Martin?" 

"I  said  good-bye  to  him  a  great  many  years  ago." 
She  smiled.  "I  had  no  one  to  see  in  America  except 
you.  No — there's  a  cab  waiting.  Good-bye." 

He  kissed  her  then.  It  was  clear  to  him  that  he 
might  only  watch  her  go.  He  saw  her  stop  to  rouse 
the  old  servant  who  waited  in  the  hall.  Then  she 
passed,  with  strange  grace,  out  of  his  Me. 

There  was  only  one  tone  to  take  with  Marty,  who 
arrived,  as  always,  late  and  breathless.  "She's  the 

79 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

most  charming  woman  I've  ever  met,  and  it's  the 
devil's  own  luck  that  she  had  to  go  straight  on  to 
Vancouver  to  get  a  steamer  back.  My  father — who 
is  apparently  a  charmer,  by  the  way — is  very  ill. 
She's  wonderful.  It's  the  biggest  thing  that  has  ever 
happened  to  me.  She's  made  everything  as  right  as 
right.  But  I  can't  tell  you  about  it.  After  twenty 
years — you  understand,  old  man " 

It  was  less  the  loyal  friend  than  the  loyal  son;  but 
he  was  still,  dining  that  night  at  Plon's  (he  wondered 
where  the  deuce  she  was  dining),  very  much  under 
her  dominion.  She  had  brought  with  her  a  rare  illu 
mination.  He  would  never  forget  her  voice  and  her 
veiled  eyes.  He  hadn't  dreamed  a  woman  could  sug 
gest  her  love  in  so  many  silent  ways.  She  just  was 
adoration,  implicit  and  incarnate.  It  was  tremen 
dous  to  have  seen  it.  The  white  light  it  threw  on 
Lawrence's  bride!  The  white  light  it  threw,  for  that 
matter,  on  all  the  women  he  knew!  He  felt  himself 
bursting  with  knowledge. 

It  was  not  until  after  dinner,  indeed,  that  he  real 
ized  just  how  wonderful  in  another  way  she  had 
been,  and  with  how  little  knowledge  of  another 

80 


THE    MANGO-SEED 

sort  she  had  left  him.  She  had  told  him  absolutely 
nothing.  So  far  as  he  was  concerned,  her  narrative 
had  only  concealed  events.  He  couldn't  remember 
whether  New  Zealand  had  followed  or  preceded 
Chile;  and  his  sincere  impression  was  that  it  didn't 
matter,  even  to  them.  Anything  that  in  all  those 
years  had  mattered,  had  been  dropped  away  out  of 
sight  between  her  sentences.  If  he  had  been  by  his 
hour  both  racked  and  inebriated  (for  that  was  what 
his  state  of  tension  amounted  to),  it  was  not  because 
of  any  facts  she  had  given  him.  She  had  not  even 
answered  his  plain  questions.  She  had  left  him  in  dis 
may  as  soon  as  he  had  begun  to  ask  them.  He  saw 
that  now,  though  in  his  simplicity  he  hadn't  seen  it 
before.  He  had  been  sacrificed  again,  as  he  had 
always  been  sacrificed.  His  mystery  was  still  his 
mystery,  and  he  was  still  left  alone  with  his  mon 
strous  hypotheses.  He  wouldn't  have  missed  it  for 
anything — not  even  for  good  old  Marty.  But  he 
turned  to  Marty  at  last  with  compunction. 
"Marty,  old  man,"  he  said,  "it  was  rum." 


81 


THE   WINE   OF   VIOLENCE 


THE   WINE  OF   VIOLENCE 

1  AM  an  old  man  now,  and,  like  many  other  old  men, 
I  feel  like  making  confession.  Not  of  my  own  sins.  I 
have  always  been  called,  I  am  well  aware,  a  dil 
ettante,  and  I  could  hardly  have  sinned  in  the  ways 
of  the  particular  sinners  of  whom  I  am  about  to 
speak.  But  I  have  the  dilettante's  liking  for  all  reali 
ties  that  do  not  brush  him  too  close.  Throughout  the 
case  of  Filippo  and  Rachel  Upcher,  I  was  always  on 
the  safe  side  of  the  footlights.  I  have  no  excuse  for 
not  being  honest,  and  I  have  at  last  an  excuse  for 
speaking.  It  is  wonderful  how  the  death  of  acquain 
tances  frees  one;  and  I  am  discovering,  at  the  end  of 
life,  the  strange,  lonely  luxury  of  being  able  to  tell  the 
truth  about  nearly  every  one  I  used  to  know.  All 
the  prolonged  conventional  disloyalties  are  passed 
away.  It  is  extraordinary  how  often  one  is  prevented 
from  telling  the  blessed  truth  about  the  familiar 
dead  because  of  some  irrelevant  survivor. 

85 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

I  do  not  know  that  there  was  much  to  choose  be 
tween  Filippo  and  Rachel  Upcher — though  the  world 
would  not  agree  with  me.  Both  of  them,  in  Solomon's 
words,  "drank  the  wine  of  violence."  I  never  really 
liked  either  of  them,  and  I  have  never  been  caught  by 
the  sentimental  adage  that  to  understand  is  to  for 
give.  If  we  are  damned,  it  is  God  who  damns  us,  and 
no  one  ventures  to  accuse  Him  of  misunderstanding. 
It  is  a  little  late  for  a  mere  acquaintance  to  hark  back 
to  the  Upchers,  but  by  accident  I,  and  I  only,  know 
the  main  facts  that  the  world  has  so  long  been  mis 
taken  about.  They  were  a  lurid  pair;  they  were  not 
of  my  clan.  But  I  cannot  resist  the  wholly  pious 
temptation  to  set  my  clan  right  about  them.  I  should 
have  done  it  long  ago,  in  years  when  it  would  have 
made  "scare-heads"  in  the  same  papers  that  of  old 
had  had  so  many  "scare-heads"  about  the  Upchers, 
but  for  my  dear  wife.  She  simply  could  not  have 
borne  it.  To  tell  the  story  is  part  of  the  melancholy 
freedom  her  death  has  bestowed  on  me. 

By  the  time  you  have  read  my  apology,  you  will 
have  remembered,  probably  with  some  disgust,  the 
Upcher  "horror."  I  am  used  to  it,  but  I  can  still 

86 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

wince  at  it.  I  have  always  been  pleased  to  recognize 
that  life,  as  my  friends  lived  it,  was  not  in  the  least 
like  the  newspapers.  Not  to  be  like  the  newspapers 
was  as  good  a  test  of  caste  as  another.  Perhaps  it  is 
well  for  a  man  to  realize,  once  in  his  time,  that  at  all 
events  the  newspapers  are  a  good  deal  like  life.  In 
any  case,  when  you  have  known  fairly  well  a  man 
sentenced  and  executed  for  murder — and  on  such 
evidence! — you  never  feel  again  like  saying  that  "one 
doesn't  know"  people  who  sue  for  breach  of  promise. 
After  all,  every  one  of  us  knows  people  who  accept 
alimony.  But  I've  enough  grudge  against  our  news 
papers  to  be  glad  that  my  true  tale  comes  too  late 
for  even  the  Orb  to  get  an  "extra"  out  of  it.  The 
Orb  made  enough,  in  its  time,  out  of  the  Upchers. 
On  the  day  when  the  charwoman  gave  her  evidence 
against  Filippo  Upcher,  the  last  copies  of  the  evening 
edition  sold  in  the  New  York  streets  for  five  dollars 
each.  I  have  said  enough  to  recall  the  case  to  you, 
and  enough,  I  hope,  to  explain  that  it's  the  kind  of 
thing  I  am  very  little  used  to  dealing  with.  "Oblige 
me  by  referring  to  the  files,"  if  you  want  the  char 
woman's  evidence.  Now  I  may  as  well  get  to  my 

87 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

story.  I  want  it,  frankly,  off  my  hands.  It  has  been 
pushing  for  a  year  into  my  Italian  Interludes; 
thrusts  itself  in,  asking  if  it  isn't,  forsooth,  as  good, 
for  emotion,  as  anything  in  the  Cinquecento.  And 
so,  God  knows,  it  is  ...  but  the  Cinquecento  char 
women  have  luckily  been  obliterated  from  history. 

I  knew  Filippo  Upcher  years  ago;  knew  him  rather 
well  in  a  world  where  the  word  "friend"  is  seldom 
correctly  used.  We  were  "pals,"  rather,  I  should 
think:  ate  and  drank  together  at  Upcher's  extraor 
dinary  hours,  and  didn't  often  see  each  other's 
wives.  It  was  Upcher's  big  period.  London  and  New 
York  went,  docile  enough,  to  see  him  act  Othello.  He 
used  to  make  every  one  weep  over  Desdemona,  I 
know,  and  that  is  more  than  Shakespeare  unassisted 
has  always  managed.  Perhaps  if  he  hadn't  done 
Othello  so  damnably  well,  with  such  a  show  of  bar 
baric  passion —  It  was  my  "little"  period,  if  I 
may  say  it;  when  I  was  having  the  inevitable  try  at 
writing  plays.  I  soon  found  that  I  could  not  write 
them,  but  meanwhile  I  lived  for  a  little  in  the  odd 
flare  of  the  theatric  world.  Filippo  Upcher — he  al 
ways  stuck,  even  in  playbills,  you  remember,  to  the 

88 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

absurd  name — I  had  met  in  my  Harvard  days,  and 
I  found  him  again  at  the  very  heart  of  that  flare. 
The  fact  that  his  mother  was  an  Italian  whose  maiden 
name  had  been  brushed  across  with  a  title  got  him 
into  certain  drawing-rooms  that  his  waistcoats  would 
have  kept  him  out  of.  She  helped  him  out,  for  ex 
ample,  in  Boston — where  "baton  sinister"  is  con 
sidered,  I  feel  sure,  merely  an  ancient  heraldic  term. 
Rachel  Upcher,  his  wife,  I  used  to  see  occasionally. 
She  had  left  the  stage  before  she  married  Upcher, 
and  I  fancy  her  tense  renditions  of  Ibsen  were  the 
last  thing  that  ever  attracted  him.  My  first  recol 
lection  of  her  is  in  a  pose  plastique  of  passionate 
regret  that  she  had  never,  in  her  brief  career,  had 
an  opportunity  to  do  Ghosts.  Rosmersholm,  I  be 
lieve,  was  as  far  as  she  ever  went.  She  had  beauty 
of  the  incongruous  kind  that  makes  you  wonder 
when,  where,  and  how  the  woman  stole  the  mask. 
She  is  absolutely  the  only  person  I  ever  met  who  gave 
you  the  original  of  the  much-imitated  "mysterious" 
type.  She  was  eternally  mysterious — and,  every  day, 
quite  impossible.  It  wasn't  to  be  expected  that  poor 
Evie  should  care  to  see  much  of  her,  and  I  never 

89 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

put  the  question  that  Mrs.  Upcher  seemed  to  be 
always  wanting  to  refuse  to  answer.  The  fact  is  that 
the  only  time  I  ever  took  poor  Evie  there,  Filippo 
and  his  wife  quarrelled  so  vulgarly  and  violently  that 
we  came  away  immediately  after  dinner.  It  would 
have  been  indecent  to  stay.  You  were  sure  that  he 
would  beat  her  as  soon  as  you  left,  but  also  that  be 
fore  he  had  hurt  her  much,  she  would  have  cut  his 
head  open  with  a  plate.  Very  much,  you  see,  in  the 
style  of  the  newspapers.  I  saw  Filippo  at  the  club  we 
both  had  the  habit  of,  and,  on  his  Anglo-Saxon  days, 
liked  him  fairly  well.  When  his  Italian  blood  rose 
beneath  his  clear  skin,  I  would  have  piled  up  any 
number  of  fictitious  engagements  to  avoid  him.  He 
was  unspeakable  then :  unappeasable,  vitriolic,  scarce 
human.  You  felt,  on  such  days,  that  he  wanted  his 
entree  smeared  with  blood,  and  you  lunched  at  an 
other  table  so  that  at  least  the  blood  shouldn't  be 
yours.  I  used  to  fancy  whimsically  that  some  an 
cestress  of  his  had  been  a  housemaid  to  the  Borgias, 
and  had  got  into  rather  distinguished  "trouble."  But 
she  must  have  been  a  housemaid.  I  did  not,  however, 
say  this  to  any  one  during  the  trial;  for  I  was  sure 

90 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

that  his  passion  was  perfectly  unpractical,  and  that 
he  took  action  only  in  his  mild  moments. 

I  found,  as  I  say,  that  I  could  not  write  plays. 
My  wife  and  I  went  abroad  for  some  years.  We  saw 
Upcher  act  once  in  London,  but  I  didn't  even  look 
him  up.  That  gives  you  the  measure  of  our  detach 
ment.  I  had  quite  forgotten  him  in  the  succeeding 
years  of  desultory,  delightful  roaming  over  southern 
Europe.  There  are  alike  so  much  to  remember  and 
so  much  to  forget,  between  Pirene  and  Lourdes !  But 
the  first  head-lines  of  the  first  newspaper  that  I 
bought  on  the  dock,  when  we  disembarked  reluc 
tantly  in  New  York,  presented  him  to  me  again.  It 
was  all  there:  the  "horror,"  the  "case,"  the  vulgar, 
garish  tragedy.  We  had  landed  in  the  thick  of  it.  It 
took  me  some  time  to  grasp  the  fact  that  a  man 
whom  I  had  occasionally  called  by  his  first  name 
was  being  accused  of  that  kind  of  thing.  I  don't  need 
to  dot  my  i's.  You  had  all  seen  Filippo  Upcher  act, 
and  you  all,  during  his  trial,  bought  the  Orb.  I  read 
it  myself — every  sickening  column  that  had  been, 
with  laborious  speed,  jotted  down  in  the  court-room. 
The  evidence  made  one  feel  that,  if  this  was  murder, 

91 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

a  man  who  merely  shoots  his  wife  through  the  heart 
need  not  be  considered  a  criminal  at  all.  It  was  the 
very  scum  of  crime.  Rachel  Upcher  had  disappeared 
after  a  violent  quarrel  with  her  husband,  in  which 
threats — overheard — had  been  freely  uttered.  He 
could  give  no  plausible  account  of  her.  Then  the 
whole  rotten  mass  of  evidence — fit  only  for  a  rag 
picker  to  handle — began  to  come  in.  The  mutilated 
body  disinterred;  the  fragments  of  marked  clothing; 
the  unused  railway  ticket — but  I  really  cannot  go 
into  it.  I  am  not  an  Orb  reporter.  The  evidence  was 
only  circumstantial,  but  it  was,  alack !  almost  better 
than  direct  testimony.  Filippo  was  perfectly  in 
coherent  in  defence,  though  he,  of  course,  pleaded 
"not  guilty."  He  had,  for  that  significant  scene — he, 
Filippo  Upcher! — no  stage  presence. 

The  country  re-echoed  the  sentence,  as  it  had  re 
echoed  every  shriek  of  the  evidence,  from  Atlantic 
to  Pacific.  The  jury  was  out  five  hours — would  have 
been  out  only  as  many  minutes  if  it  had  not  been 
for  one  Campbell,  an  undertaker,  who  had  some 
doubts  as  to  the  sufficiency  of  the  "remains"  dis 
interred  to  make  evidence.  But  the  marked  under- 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

clothing  alone  made  their  fragmentariness  negligible. 
Campbell  was  soon  convinced  of  that.  It  was  con 
fused  enough,  in  all  conscience — he  told  Upcher's 
and  my  friend,  Ted  Sloan,  later — but  he  guessed  the 
things  the  charwoman  overheard  were  enough  to 
convict  any  man;  he'd  stick  to  that.  Of  course,  the 
prosecuting  attorney  hadn't  rested  his  case  on  the 
imperfect  state  of  the  body,  anyhow — had  just 
brought  it  in  to  show  how  nasty  it  had  been  all 
round.  It  didn't  even  look  very  well  for  him  to 
challenge  medical  experts,  though  a  body  that  had 
been  buried  was  a  little  more  in  his  line  than  it  was 
in  theirs,  perhaps.  And  any  gentleman  in  his  pro 
fession  had  had,  he  might  say,  more  practical  ex 
perience  than  people  who  lectured  in  colleges.  He 
hadn't  himself,  though,  any  call  from  superior 
technical  knowledge  to  put  spokes  in  the  wheel  of 
justice.  He  guessed  that  was  what  you'd  call  a 
quibble.  And  he  was  crazy  to  get  home — Mrs.  C.  was 
expecting  her  first,  any  time  along.  Sloan  said  the 
man  seemed  honest  enough;  and  he  was  quite  right 
— the  chain  of  circumstance  was,  alas!  complete. 
Upcher  was  convicted  of  murder  in  the  first  degree, 

93 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

and  sentenced  to  death.  He  didn't  appeal — wouldn't, 
in  spite  of  his  counsel,  and  Sloan's  impassioned  ad 
vice:  "Give  'em  a  run  for  their  money,  Filippo. 
Be  a  sport,  anyhow!" 

"Lord,  man,  all  juries  are  alike,"  was  the  response. 
"They've  no  brains.  I  wouldn't  have  the  ghost  of  a 
show,  and  I'm  not  going  through  that  racket  again, 
and  make  a  worse  fool  of  myself  on  the  stand  another 
time." 

"But  if  you  don't,  they'll  take  it  you've  owned 
up." 

"Not  necessarily,  after  they've  read  my  will. 
I've  left  Rachel  the  *  second  best  bed.'  There  wasn't 
much  else.  She's  got  more  than  I  ever  had.  No, 
Sloan,  a  man  must  be  guilty  to  want  to  appeal.  No 
innocent  man  would  go  through  that  hell  twice.  I 
want  to  get  out  and  be  quiet." 

The  only  appeal  he  did  make  was  not  such  as  to 
give  Mr.  Campbell  any  retrospective  qualms  of  con 
science.  The  request  was  never  meant  to  get  out, 
but,  like  so  many  other  things  marked  "private,"  it 
did.  His  petition  was  for  being  allowed  to  act  a  cer 
tain  number  of  nights  before  his  execution.  He  owed 

94 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

frightful  sums,  but,  as  he  said,  no  sums,  however 
frightful,  could  fail  to  be  raised  by  such  a  device. 

"  It  would  kill  your  chances  of  a  reprieve,  Filippo," 
Sloan  said  he  told  him. 

"Reprieve?"  Filippo  had  laughed.  "Why,  it  would 
prove  me  guilty.  It  would  turn  all  the  evidence  pale. 
But  think  of  the  box-office  receipts.  There  would 
have  to  be  a  platoon  of  police  deadheading  in  the 
front  rows,  of  course.  But  even  at  that !" 

Sloan  came  away  a  little  firmer  for  circumstantial 
evidence  than  he  had  been  before.  He  wouldn't  see 
Filippo  again;  wouldn't  admit  that  it  was  a  good  epi 
gram;  wouldn't  even  admit  that  it  was  rather  fine 
of  Filippo  to  be  making  epigrams  at  all.  Most  people 
agreed  with  him:  thought  Upcher  shockingly  cyn 
ical.  But  of  course  people  never  take  into  account 
the  difference  there  is  between  being  convicted  and 
pleading  guilty.  Is  it  not  de  rigueur  that,  in  those  cir 
cumstances,  a  man's  manner  should  be  that  of  inno 
cence?  Filippo's  flight  has  always  seemed  to  me  a 
really  fine  one.  But  I  do  not  know  of  any  man  one 
could  count  on  to  distil  from  it  the  pure  attar  of 
honesty. 

95 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

We  had  gone  straight  to  my  wife's  family  in  New 
England,  on  arriving.  Until  I  saw  Sloan,  I  had  got  my 
sole  information  about  Upcher  from  the  newspapers. 
Sloan's  account  of  Filippo's  way  of  taking  it  roused 
my  conscience.  If  a  man,  after  all  that,  could  show 
any  decency,  one  owed  him  something.  I  decided, 
without  consulting  my  wife  about  it,  to  go  over  to 
New  York  and  see  Filippo  myself.  Evie  was  so  done 
up  by  the  thought  of  having  once  dined  with  the 
Upchers  that  I  could  hardly  have  broken  my  inten 
tion  to  her.  I  told  her,  of  course,  after  I  returned,  but 
to  know  beforehand  might  have  meant  a  real  illness 
for  her.  I  should  have  spared  her  all  of  it,  had  it  not 
seemed  to  me,  at  the  moment,  my  duty  to  go.  The 
interview  was  not  easy  to  manage,  but  I  used  Evie's 
connections  shamelessly,  and  in  the  end  the  arrange 
ment  was  made.  I  have  always  been  glad  that  I  went, 
but  I  don't  know  anything  more  nerve-racking  than 
to  visit  a  condemned  criminal  whose  guilt  you  can 
not  manage  to  doubt.  Only  Filippo's  proposal  (of 
which  Sloan  had  told  me)  to  act  long  enough  to  pay 
his  debts,  made  me  do  it.  I  still  persist  in  thinking  it 
magnificent  of  Filippo,  though  I  don't  pretend  there 

96 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

wasn't  in  his  desire  some  lingering  lust  of  good  report. 
The  best  he  could  hope  for  was  to  be  forgotten;  but 
he  would  naturally  rather  be  forgotten  as  Hamlet 
than  as  Filippo  Upcher. 

Upcher  was  not  particularly  glad  to  see  me,  but 
he  made  the  situation  as  little  strained  as  possible. 
He  did  no  violent  protesting,  no  arraigning  of  law 
and  justice.  If  he  had,  perhaps,  acted  according  to 
the  dictates  of  his  hypothetical  ancestress,  he  at  least 
spoke  calmly  enough.  He  seemed  to  regard  himself 
less  as  unjustly  accused  than  as  unjustly  executed, 
if  I  may  say  so:  he  looked  on  himself  as  a  dead 
man;  his  calamity  was  irretrievable.  The  dead  may 
judge,  but  I  fancy  they  don't  shriek.  At  all  events, 
Upcher  didn't.  A  proof  of  his  having  cast  hope  care 
lessly  over  his  shoulder  was  his  way  of  speaking  of 
his  wife.  He  didn't  even  take  the  trouble  to  use  the 
present  tense;  to  stress,  as  it  were,  her  flesh-and- 
blood  reality.  It  was  "Rachel  was,"  never  "Rachel 
is  " — as  we  sometimes  use  the  past  tense  to  indicate 
that  people  have  gone  out  of  our  lives  by  their  own 
fault.  The  way  in  which  he  spoke  of  her  was  not 
tactful.  A  franker  note  of  hatred  I've  never — except 

97 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

perhaps  once — heard  struck.  Occasionally  he  would 
pull  himself  up,  as  if  he  remembered  that  the  dead 
are  our  natural  creditors  for  kindly  speech. 

"She  was  a  devil,  and  only  a  devil  could  live 
with  her.  But  there's  no  point  in  going  into  it 
now." 

I  rather  wanted  him  to  go  into  it:  not — might 
Heaven  forbid! — to  confess,  but  to  justify  himself, 
to  gild  his  stained  image.  I  tried  frankness. 

"I  think  I'll  tell  you,  Upcher,  that  I  never  liked 
her." 

He  nodded.  "She  was  poison;  and  I  am  poisoned. 
That's  the  whole  thing." 

I  was  silent  for  a  moment.  How  much  might  it 
mean? 

"You  read  the  evidence?"  he  broke  out.  "Well, 
it  was  bad — damned  bad  and  dirty.  I'd  rather  be 
hanged  straight  than  hear  it  all  again.  But  it's  the 
kind  of  thing  you  get  dragged  into  sooner  or  later 
if  you  link  yourself  to  a  creature  like  that.  I  suppose 
I'm  essentially  vulgar,  but  I'm  a  better  lot  than  she 
was — for  all  her  looks." 

"She  had  looks,"  I  admitted. 
98 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

"No  one  could  touch  her  at  her  best.  But  she 
was  an  unspeakable  cat." 

It  had  been,  all  of  it,  about  as  much  as  I  could 
stand,  and  I  prepared  to  go.  My  time,  in  any  case, 
was  about  up.  I  found  it — in  spite  of  the  evidence — 
shockingly  hard  to  say  good-bye  to  Upcher.  You 
know  what  farewells  by  a  peaceful  death-bed  are; 
and  you  can  imagine  this. 

There  was  nothing  to  do  but  grip  his  hand. 
"Good-bye,  Filippo." 

"Good-bye,  old  man.  I'll  see  you — "  The  familiar 
phrase  was  extinguished  on  his  lips.  We  stared  at 
each  other  helplessly  for  an  instant.  Then  the  warder 
led  me  out. 

The  Upcher  trial — since  Filippo  refused  to  appeal 
— had  blown  over  a  bit  by  the  time  I  went  West. 
My  widowed  sister  was  ill,  and  I  left  Evie  and  every 
one,  to  take  her  to  southern  California.  We  followed 
the  conventional  route  of  flight  from  tuberculosis, 
and  lingered  a  little  in  Arizona,  looking  down  into 
the  unspeakable  depths  of  the  Grand  Canon.  I  rather 
hoped  Letitia  would  stay  there,  for  I've  never  seen 
anything  else  so  good;  but  the  unspeakable  depths 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

spoke  to  her  words  of  terror.  She  wanted  southern 
California:  roses,  and  palms,  and  more  people.  It 
was  before  the  Santa  Fe  ran  its  line  up  to  Bright 
Angel,  and  of  course  El  Tovar  wasn't  built.  It  was 
rather  rough  living.  Besides,  there  were  Navajos  and 
Hopis  all  about,  and  Letitia  came  of  good  Abolition 
ist  stock  and  couldn't  stand  anything  that  wasn't 
white.  So  we  went  on  to  Santa  Barbara. 

There  we  took  a  house  with  a  garden;  rode  daily 
down  to  the  Pacific,  and  watched  the  great  blue 
horizon  waves  roll  ever  westward  to  the  immemorial 
East.  "China's  just  across,  and  that  is  why  it  looks 
so  different  from  the  Atlantic,"  I  used  to  explain  to 
Letitia;  but  she  was  never  disloyal  to  the  North 
Shore  of  Massachusetts.  She  liked  the  rose-pink 
mountains,  and  even  the  romantic  Mission  of  the 
Scarlet  Woman;  but  she  liked  best  her  whist  with 
gentle,  white-shawled  ladies,  and  the  really  intel 
lectual  conversations  she  had  with  certain  college 
professors  from  the  East.  I  could  not  get  her  to  take 
ship  for  Hawaii  or  Samoa.  She  distrusted  the  Pacific. 
After  all,  China  was  just  across. 

I  grew  rather  bored,  myself,  by  Santa  Barbara, 
100 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

before  the  winter  was  out.  Something  more  exotic, 
too,  would  have  been  good  for  Letitia.  There  was  a 
little  colony  from  my  sister's  Holy  Land,  and  in  the 
evenings  you  could  fancy  yourself  on  Brattle  Street. 
She  had  managed,  even  there,  to  befog  herself  in  a 
New  England  atmosphere.  I  was  sure  it  was  bad  for 
her  throat.  I  won't  deny,  either,  that  there  was  more 
than  anxiety  at  the  heart  of  my  impatience.  I  could 
not  get  Filippo  Upcher  out  of  my  head.  After  all,  I 
had  once  seen  much  of  him;  and,  even  more  than 
that,  I  had  seen  him  act  a  hundred  times.  Any  one 
who  had  seen  him  do  Macbeth  would  know  that 
Filippo  Upcher  could  not  commit  a  murder  without 
afterthoughts,  however  little  forethought  there  might 
have  been  in  it.  It  was  all  very  well  for  van  Vreck  to 
speculate  on  Filippo's  ancestry  and  suggest  that  the 
murder  was  a  pretty  case  of  atavism — holding  the 
notion  up  to  the  light  with  his  claret  and  smiling 
aesthetically.  Upcher  had  had  a  father  of  sorts,  and 
he  wasn't  all  Borgia — or  housemaid.  Evie  never 
smirched  her  charming  pages  with  the  name  of  Up 
cher,  and  I  was  cut  off  from  the  Orb;  but  I  felt  sure 
that  the  San  Francisco  papers  would  announce  the 
101 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

date  of  his  execution  in  good  time.  I  scanned  them 
with  positive  fever.  Nothing  could  rid  me  of  the 
fantastic  notion  that  there  would  be  a  terrible  scene 
for  Upcher  on  the  other  side  of  the  grave;  that  death 
would  but  release  him  to  Rachel  Upcher's  Stygian 
fury.  It  seemed  odd  that  he  should  not  have  pre 
ferred  a  disgusted  jury  to  such  a  ghost  before  its  ire 
was  spent.  The  thought  haunted  me;  and  there  was 
no  one  in  Letitia's  so  satisfactory  circle  to  whom  I 
could  speak.  I  began  to  want  the  open;  for  the  first 
time  in  my  life,  to  desire  the  sound  of  unmodulated 
voices.  Besides,  Letitia's  regime  was  silly.  I  took 
drastic  measures. 

It  was  before  the  blessed  days  of  limousines,  and 
one  had  to  arrange  a  driving  trip  with  care.  Letitia 
behaved  very  well.  She  was  really  worried  about  her 
throat,  and  absurdly  grateful  to  me  for  giving  up 
my  winter  to  it.  I  planned  as  comfortably  as  I  could 
for  her — even  suggested  that  we  should  ask  an  ac 
quaintance  or  two  to  join  us.  She  preferred  going 
alone  with  me,  however,  and  I  was  glad.  Just  before 
we  started,  while  I  was  still  wrangling  with  would-be 
guides  and  drivers  and  sellers  of  horses,  the  news  of 
102 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

Upcher's  execution  came.  If  I  could  have  suppressed 
that  day's  newspapers  in  Santa  Barbara,  I  should 
have  done  so,  for,  little  as  I  had  liked  Filippo,  I  liked 
less  hearing  the  comments  of  Letitia's  friends.  They 
discussed  the  case,  criminologically,  through  an  in 
teresting  evening.  It  was  quite  scientific  and  intol 
erably  silly.  I  hurried  negotiations  for  the  trip,  and 
bought  a  horse  or  two  rather  recklessly.  Anything,  I 
felt,  to  get  off.  We  drove  away  from  the  hotel,  wav 
ing  our  hands  to  a  trim  group  (just  photographed) 
on  the  porch. 

The  days  that  followed  soothed  me:  wild  and 
golden  and  increasingly  lonely.  We  had  a  sort  of 
cooking  kit  with  us,  which  freed  us  from  too  detailed 
a  schedule,  and  could  have  camped,  after  a  fashion; 
but  usually  by  sundown  we  made  some  rough  tavern 
or  other.  Letitia  looked  askance  at  these,  and  I  did 
not  blame  her.  As  we  struck  deeper  in  toward  the 
mountains,  the  taverns  disappeared,  and  we  found 
in  their  stead  lost  ranches — self-sufficing,  you  would 
say,  until,  in  the  parched  faces  of  the  womenfolk, 
all  pretence  of  sufficiency  broke  down.  Letitia  picked 
up  geological  specimens  and  was  in  every  way  admi- 
103 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

rable,  but  I  did  not  wish  to  give  her  an  overdose. 
After  a  little  less  than  a  fortnight,  I  decided  to  start 
back  to  Santa  Barbara.  We  were  to  avoid  travelling 
the  same  country  twice,  and  our  route,  mapped, 
would  eventually  be  a  kind  of  rough  ellipse.  We  had 
just  swung  round  the  narrow  end,  you  might  say, 
when  our  first  real  accident  occurred.  The  heat  had 
been  very  great,  and  our  driver  had,  I  suspect,  drunk 
too  much.  At  all  events,  he  had  not  watched  his 
horses  as  he  should  have  done,  and  one  of  the  poor 
beasts,  in  the  mid-afternoon,  fell  into  a  desperate 
state  with  colic.  We  did  what  we  could — he  nearly  as 
stupid  as  I  over  it — but  it  was  clear  that  we  could 
not  go  on  that  night  whither  we  had  intended.  It 
was  a  question  of  finding  shelter,  and  help  for  the 
suffering  animal.  The  sky  looked  threatening.  I  des 
patched  the  inadequate  driver  in  search  of  a  refuge, 
and  set  myself  to  impart  hope  to  Letitia.  The  man 
returned  in  a  surprisingly  short  time,  having  seen  the 
outbuildings  of  a  ranch-house.  I  need  not  dwell  on 
details.  We  made  shift  to  get  there  eventually,  poor 
collapsed  beast  and  all.  A  ranchman  of  sorts  met  us 
and  conducted  Letitia  to  the  house.  The  ranch  be- 
104 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

longed,  he  said,  to  a  Mrs.  Wace,  and  to  Mrs.  Wace, 
presumably,  he  gave  her  in  charge.  I  did  not,  at  the 
moment,  wish  to  leave  our  horse  until  I  saw  into  what 
hands  I  was  resigning  him.  The  hands  seemed  com 
petent  enough,  and  the  men  assured  me  that  the  ani 
mal  could  travel  the  next  day.  When  the  young 
man  returned  from  the  ranch-house,  I  was  quite 
ready  to  follow  him  back  thither,  and  get  news  of 
Letitia.  He  left  me  inside  a  big  living-room.  A  Chinese 
servant  appeared  presently  and  contrived  to  make 
me  understand  that  Mrs.  Wace  would  come  down 
when  she  had  looked  after  my  sister.  I  was  still 
thinking  about  the  horse  when  I  heard  the  rustle  of 
skirts.  Our  hostess  had  evidently  established  Letitia. 
I  turned,  with  I  know  not  what  beginnings  of  apolo 
getic  or  humorous  explanation  on  my  lips.  The  be 
ginning  was  the  end,  for  I  stood  face  to  face  with 
Rachel  Upcher. 

I  have  never  known  just  how  the  next  moments 
went.  She  recognized  me  instantly,  and  evidently  to 
her  dismay.  I  know  that  before  I  could  shape  my 
lips  to  any  words  that  should  be  spoken,  she  had 
had  time  to  sit  down  and  to  suggest,  by  some  mo- 
105 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

tion  of  her  hand,  that  I  should  do  the  same.  I  did 
not  sit;  I  stood  before  her.  It  was  only  when  she 
began  some  phrase  of  conventional  surprise  at  seeing 
me  in  that  place  of  all  places  that  I  found  speech.  I 
made  nothing  of  it;  I  had  no  solution;  yet  my  mes 
sage  seemed  too  urgent  for  delay.  All  that  I  had  suf 
fered  in  my  so  faint  connection  with  Filippo  Upcher's 
tragedy  returned  to  me  in  one  envenomed  pang.  I 
fear  that  I  wanted  most,  at  the  moment,  to  pass  that 
pang  on  to  the  woman  before  me.  My  old  impatience 
of  her  type,  her  cheap  mysteriousness,  her  purpose 
less  inscrutability  possessed  me.  I  do  not  defend  my 
mood;  I  only  give  it  to  you  as  it  was.  I  have  often 
noticed  that  crucial  moments  are  appallingly  simple 
to  live  through.  The  brain  constructs  the  labyrinth 
afterwards.  All  perplexities  were  merged  for  me  just 
then  in  that  one  desire — to  speak,  to  wound  her. 
But  my  task  was  not  easy,  and  I  have  never  been 
proud  of  the  fashion  of  its  performance. 

"Mrs.  Wace"  (even  the  subtle  van  Vreck  could 
not  have  explained  why  I  did  not  give  her  her  own 
name),  "is  it  possible — but  I  pray  Heaven  it  is — 
that  you  don't  know?" 

106 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

"Know?"  It  was  the  voice  of  a  stone  sphinx. 

"How  can  I  tell  you — how  can  I  tell  you?" 

"What?" 

"About  Filippo." 

"Filippo?" 

"Yes,  Filippo!  That  he  is  dead." 

"Dead?"  The  carved  monosyllables  were  mad 
dening. 

"Yes — killed.  Tried,  sentenced,  executed." 

Her  left  hand  dropped  limply  from  the  lace  at  her 
throat  to  a  ruffle  of  her  dress.  "  For  what?  "  Her  voice 
vibrated  for  the  first  time. 

"For  murdering  you." 

"Me?"  She  seemed  unable  to  take  it  in. 

"You  must  have  seen  the  papers." 

"I  have  seen  no  papers.  Does  one  leave  the  world 
as  utterly  as  I  have  left  it,  to  read  newspapers?  On  a 
lonely  ranch  like  this" — she  broke  off.  "I  haven't 
so  much  as  seen  one  for  five  months.  I — I — "  Then 
she  pulled  herself  together.  "Tell  me.  This  is  some 
horrid  farce.  What  do  you  mean?  For  God's  sake, 
man,  tell  me!" 

She  sat  back  to  hear. 

107 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

I  cannot  remember  the  words  in  which  I  told  her. 
I  sketched  the  thing  for  her — the  original  mystery, 
breaking  out  at  last  into  open  scandal  when  the  dis 
membered  body  was  found;  the  evidence  (such  of  it 
as  I  could  bring  myself  to  utter  in  the  presence  of 
that  so  implicated  figure);  the  course  of  the  trial; 
Filippo's  wretched  defence;  the  verdict;  the  horrid, 
inevitable  result.  My  bitterness  grew  with  the  story, 
but  I  held  myself  resolutely  to  a  tone  of  pity.  After 
all — it  shot  across  my  mind — Filippo  Upcher  had 
perhaps  in  the  grave  found  peace. 

It  must  have  taken  me,  for  my  broken,  difficult 
account,  half  an  hour.  Not  once  in  that  time  was  I 
interrupted.  She  seemed  hardly  to  breathe.  I  told 
her  to  the  very  date  and  hour  of  his  execution.  I 
could  give  her  no  comfort;  only,  at  best,  bald  facts. 
For  what  exhibition  of  self-loathing  or  self-pity  I 
had  been  prepared  I  do  not  know;  but  surely  for 
some.  I  had  been  bracing  myself  throughout  for 
any  kind  of  scene.  No  scene  of  any  kind  occurred. 
She  was  hard  and  mute  as  stone.  I  could  have 
dealt  better,  when  at  last  I  stopped,  with  hysterics 
than  with  that  figure  before  me — tense,  exhausted, 
108 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

terrible.  I  found  myself  praying  for  her  tears.  But 
none  came. 

At  last  I  rose — hoping  by  the  sudden  gesture  to 
break  her  trance.  Her  eyes  followed  me.  "Terrible — 
terrible — beyond  anything  I  ever  dreamed."  I  caught 
the  whispered  words.  I  took  the  chance  for  pity; 
found  myself — though  I  detested  the  woman  as 
never  before — wanting  to  comfort  her. 

"He  never  appealed,"  I  reminded  her.  "Perhaps 
he  was  glad  to  die."  It  sounded  weak  and  strange; 
but  who  could  tell  what  words  would  reach  that 
weak,  strange  heart? 

I  stood  before  her,  more  perplexed  than  at  any 
other  moment  of  my  life.  At  last  she  opened  her  eyes 
and  spoke.  "Leave  me.  And  do  not  tell  your  sister 
who  I  am.  I  shall  pull  myself  together  by  dinner 
time.  Go!"  She  just  lifted  her  hand,  then  closed  her 
eyes  again. 

I  went  out,  and,  stumbling  across  a  Chinese  ser 
vant,  got  him  to  show  me  my  room. 

Of  what  use  would  it  be  to  recall,  after  all  the 
years,  what  I  felt  and  thought  during  the  next  hours? 
I  did  not  try  to  send  Letitia  to  Mrs.  Upcher.  Letitia 
109 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

would  have  been  of  no  use,  even  if  she  had  consented 
to  go.  It  was  sheerest  wisdom  to  obey  Rachel  Up- 
cher,  and  not  to  tell.  But  I  had  a  spasm  of  real  terror 
when  I  thought  of  her  "pulling  herself  together"  in 
her  lonely  chamber.  I  listened  for  a  scream,  a  pistol- 
shot.  It  did  not  seem  to  me  that  a  woman  could  hear 
news  like  that  which  it  had  been  my  tragic  luck  to 
give,  without  some  according  show  of  emotion.  Yet 
a  little  later  I  asked  myself  in  good  faith  what  show 
could  ever  fit  that  situation.  What  speech,  what  ges 
ture,  in  that  hour,  would  have  been  adequate?  The 
dangerous  days,  in  point  of  fact,  would  probably 
come  later.  I  thought  more  of  her,  in  those  two  hours, 
than  of  Filippo.  Though  she  might  well,  from  all  the 
evidence,  have  hated  him  quite  honestly,  hers  was 
the  ironic  destiny  that  is  harder  to  bear  than  mere 
martyrdom.  No  death  had  ever  been  more  acciden 
tal,  more  irrelevant,  more  preventable  than  Filip- 
po's.  One  fortnight  sooner,  she  could  have  turned 
back  the  wheel  that  had  now  come  full  circle.  That 
was  to  be  her  Hell,  and — well,  having  descended  into 
it  in  those  two  hours,  I  was  glad  enough  to  mount 
once  more  into  the  free  air. 
110 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

Mrs.  Upcher  kept  her  promise.  She  pulled  herself 
together  and  came  to  dinner,  in  a  high  black  dress 
without  so  much  as  a  white  ruche  to  relieve  it.  The 
manager  of  the  ranch,  a  young  Englishman  named 
Floyd,  dined  with  us.  He  was  handsome  in  a  blood 
shot  way,  and  a  detrimental,  if  ever  there  has  been 
one.  In  love  with  Mrs.  Upcher  he  looked  to  be;  that, 
too,  in  the  same  bloodshot  way.  But  she  clearly  had 
him  in  perfect  order.  The  mask,  I  suppose,  had 
worked.  Letitia  did  her  social  best,  but  her  informing 
talk  failed  to  produce  any  pleasant  effect.  It  was  too 
neat  and  flat.  Floyd  watched  Mrs.  Upcher,  and  she 
watched  the  opposite  wall.  I  did  my  best  to  watch  no 
one.  We  were  rather  like  a  fortuitous  group  at  a  pro 
vincial  table  d'hote:  dissatisfied  with  conditions  and 
determined  not  to  make  acquaintance.  We  were  all 
thankful,  I  should  think,  when  the  meal  was  over. 
Mrs.  Upcher  made  no  attempt  to  amuse  us  or  make 
us  comfortable.  The  young  manager  left  for  his  own 
quarters  immediately  after  dinner,  and  Letitia  soon 
went  to  her  room.  I  lingered  for  a  moment,  out  of 
decency,  thinking  Rachel  Upcher  might  want  to 
speak  to  me,  to  ask  me  something,  to  cry  out  to  me, 
111 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

to  clutch  me  for  some  desperate  end.  She  sat  abso 
lutely  silent  for  five  minutes;  and,  seeing  that  the 
spell,  whatever  it  was,  was  not  yet  broken,  I  left  her. 
I  did  not  go  to  bed  at  once.  How  should  I  have 
done  that?  I  was  still  listening  for  that  scream,  that 
pistol-shot.  Nothing  came.  I  remember  that,  after  an 
hour,  I  found  it  all  receding  from  me — the  Upchers* 
crossed  emotions  and  perverted  fates.  It  was  like 
stepping  out  of  a  miasmic  mist.  Filippo  Upcher  was 
dead;  and  on  the  other  side  of  the  grave  there  had 
been  no  such  encounter  for  him  as  I  had  imagined. 
And  I  had  positively  seen  a  demoniac  Rachel  Up 
cher  waiting  for  him  on  that  pale  verge!  I  searched 
the  room  for  books.  There  was  some  Ibsen,  which  at 
that  moment  I  did  not  want.  I  rejected,  one  after  one, 
nearly  all  the  volumes  that  the  shelves  held.  It  was  a 
stupid  collection.  I  had  about  made  up  my  mind  to 
the  "Idylls  of  the  King"  (they  were  different  enough, 
in  all  conscience,  from  the  Upcher  case)  when  I  saw 
a  pile  of  magazines  on  a  table  in  a  distant  corner. 
"Something  sentimental,"  I  proposed  to  myself,  as  I 
went  over  to  ravage  them.  Underneath  the  maga 
zines — a  scattered  lot,  for  the  most  part,  of  London 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

Graphics  and  English  Illustrateds — I  found  a  serried 
pack  of  newspapers:  San  Francisco  and  Denver 
sheets,  running  a  few  months  back.  I  had  never  seen  a 
Denver  newspaper,  and  I  picked  one  up  to  read  the 
editorials,  out  of  a  desultory  curiosity  rare  with  me. 
On  the  first  page,  black  head-lines  took  a  familiar 
contour.  I  had  stumbled  on  the  charwoman's  evi 
dence  against  Filippo  Upcher.  Rien  que  ga  ! 

My  first  feeling,  I  remember,  was  one  of  impotent 
anger — the  child's  raving  at  the  rain — that  I  must 
spend  the  night  in  that  house.  It  was  preposterous 
that  life  should  ask  it  of  me.  Talk  of  white  nights! 
What,  pray,  would  be  the  color  of  mine?  Then  I,  in 
my  turn,  "pulled  myself  together."  I  went  back  to 
the  newspapers  and  examined  them  all.  The  little  file 
was  arranged  in  chronological  order  and  was  coex 
tensive  with  the  Upcher  case,  from  arrest  to  an 
nouncement  of  the  execution.  The  Orb  might  have 
been  a  little  fuller,  but  not  much.  The  West  had  not 
been  fickle  to  Filippo. 

I  sat  staring  at  the  neatly  folded  papers  for  a  time. 
They  seemed  to  me  monstrous,  not  fit  to  touch,  as 
if  they  were  by  no  means  innocent  of  Filippo  Up- 
113 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

cher's  fate.  By  a  trick  of  nerves  and  weak  lamplight, 
there  seemed  to  be  nothing  else  in  the  room.  I  was 
alone  in  the  world  with  them.  How  long  I  sat  there, 
fixing  them  with  eyes  that  must  have  shown  clear 
loathing,  I  have  never  known.  There  are  moments 
like  that,  which  contrive  cunningly  to  exist  outside 
of  Time  and  Space,  of  which  you  remember  only  the 
quality.  But  I  know  that  when  I  heard  steps  in  the 
corridor,  I  was  sure  for  an  instant  that  it  was 
Filippo  Upcher  returning.  I  was  too  overwrought  to 
reflect  that,  whatever  the  perils  of  Rachel  Upcher 's 
house  might  be,  the  intrusion  of  the  dead  Filippo  was 
not  one  of  them :  that  he  would  profit  resolutely  by 
the  last  league  of  those  fortunate  distances — if  so  it 
chanced,  by  the  immunity  of  very  Hell.  It  could  not 
be  Filippo's  hand  that  knocked  so  nervously  on  the 
door.  Nor  was  it.  I  opened  to  Rachel  Upcher.  The 
first  glance  at  her  face,  her  eyes,  her  aimless,  fever 
ish,  clutching  hands,  showed  that  the  spell  had  at 
last  been  broken.  She  had  taken  off  her  black  dress 
and  was  wrapped  in  loose,  floating,  waving  pink. 
Have  you  ever  imagined  the  Erinyes  in  pink?  No 
other  conceivable  vision  suggests  the  figure  that 
114 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

stood  before  me.  I  remember  wondering  foolishly 
and  irrelevantly  why,  if  she  could  look  like  that,  she 
had  not  done  Ibsen  better.  But  she  brought  me  back 
to  fact  as  she  beckoned  me  out  of  the  room. 

"I  am  sorry — very  sorry — but — I  was  busy  with 
your  sister  when  you  came  in,  and  they  have  given 
you  the  wrong  room.  I  will  send  some  one  to  move 
your  things — I  will  show  you  your  room.  Please 
come — I  am  sorry." 

I  cannot  describe  her  voice.  The  words  came  out 
with  difficult,  unnatural  haste,  like  blood  from  a 
wound.  Between  them  she  clutched  at  this  or  that 
shred  of  lace.  But  I  could  deal  better  even  with 
frenzy  than  with  the  mask  that  earlier  I  had  so 
little  contrived  to  disturb.  I  felt  relieved,  disbur 
dened.  And  Filippo  was  safe — safe.  I  was  free  to 
deal  as  I  would. 

I  stepped  back  into  the  room.  The  pile  of  papers 
no  longer  controlled  my  nerves.  After  all,  they  had 
been  but  the  distant  reek  of  the  monster.  I  went 
over  and  lifted  them,  then  faced  her. 

"Is  this  what  you  mean  by  the  wrong  room?" 

She  must  have  seen  at  once  that  I  had  examined 
llo 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

them;  that  I  had  sounded  the  whole  significance  of 
their  presence  there.  The  one  on  top — I  had  not 
disturbed  their  order — gave  in  clear  print  the  date 
fixed  for  Filippo  Upcher's  execution:  that  date  now 
a  fortnight  back.  And  she  had  played  to  me,  as  if  I 
were  a  gallery  god,  with  her  black  dress! 

"I  have  looked  them  through,"  I  went  on;  "and 
though  I  didn't  need  to  read  those  columns,  I  know 
just  what  they  contain.  You  knew  it  all."  I  paused. 
It  would  have  taken,  it  seemed  to  me,  the  vocabu 
lary  of  a  major  prophet  to  denounce  her  fitly.  I 
could  only  leave  it  at  that  bald  hint  of  her  baseness. 

She  made  no  attempt  at  denial  or  defence.  Some 
thing  happened  in  her  face — something  more  like 
dissolution  than  like  change — as  if  the  elements  of 
her  old  mask  would  never  reassemble.  She  stepped 
forward,  still  gathering  the  floating  ribands,  the 
loose  laces,  in  her  nervous  hands.  Once  she  turned 
as  if  listening  for  a  sound.  Then  she  sat  down  be 
side  my  fire,  her  head  bent  forward  toward  me; 
ready,  it  seemed,  to  speak.  Her  fingers  moved  con 
stantly,  pulling,  knotting,  smoothing  the  trailing 
streamers  of  her  gown.  The  rest  of  her  body  was  as 
116 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

still  as  Filippo  Upcher's  own.  I  endured  her  eyes  for 
a  moment.  Then  I  repeated  my  accusation.  "You 
knew  it  all.'* 

"Yes,  I  knew  it  all." 

I  had  not  dreamed,  in  spite  of  the  papers  that  I 
clutched  in  full  view  of  her,  that  she  would  confess 
so  simply.  But  they  apparently  brought  speech  to 
her  lips.  She  did  not  go  on  at  once,  and  when  she 
did,  she  sounded  curiously  as  Filippo  Upcher  in 
prison  had  sounded.  Her  voice  touched  him  only 
with  disgust.  Yet  she  stinted  no  detail,  and  I  had 
to  hear  of  Filippo's  vices:  his  vanities,  his  indis 
cretions,  his  infidelities,  all  the  seven  deadly  sins 
against  her  pride  committed  by  him  daily.  He  may 
have  been  only  a  bounder,  but  his  punishment  had 
been  fit  for  one  heroic  in  sin.  I  did  my  best  to  keep 
that  discrepancy  in  mind  as  she  went  on  vulgariz 
ing  him.  I  am  no  cross-questioner,  and  I  let  her  ac 
count  move,  without  interruption,  to  the  strange, 
fluttering  tempo  of  her  hands.  Occasionally  her 
voice  found  a  vibrant  note,  but  for  the  most  part  it 
was  flat,  impersonal  as  a  phonograph:  the  voice  of 
the  actress  who  is  not  at  home  in  the  unstudied 
117 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

role.  I  do  not  think  she  gauged  her  effect;  I  am  sure 
that  she  was  given  wholly  to  the  task  of  describing 
her  hideous  attitude  veraciously.  There  was  no  hint 
of  appeal  in  her  tone,  as  to  some  dim  tribunal  which 
I  might  represent;  but  she  seemed,  once  started, 
to  like  to  tell  her  story.  It  was  not  really  a  story — 
the  patched  portrait  of  a  hatred,  rather.  Once  or 
twice  I  opened  my  lips  to  cry  out:  "Why  not,  in 
Heaven's  name,  a  divorce  rather  than  this?"  I  al 
ways  shut  them  without  asking,  and  before  the  end 
I  understood.  The  two  had  simply  hated  each  other 
too  much.  They  could  never  be  adequately  divorced 
while  both  beheld  the  sun.  To  walk  the  same  earth 
was  too  oppressive,  too  intimate  a  tie.  It  sounds  in 
credible — even  to  me,  now;  but  I  believed  it  with 
out  difficulty  at  that  moment.  I  remembered  the 
firmness  with  which  Filippo  had  declared  that,  her 
self  poison,  she  had  poisoned  him.  Well,  there  were 
fangs  beneath  her  tongue. 

Heaven  knows — it's  the  one  thing  I  don't  know 

about  it,  to  this  day — if  there  was  any  deliberate 

attempt  on  Rachel  Upcher's  part  to  give  her  flight 

a  suspicious  look.  There  were  so  many  ways,  when 

118 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

once  you  knew  for  a  fact  that  Filippo  had  not  killed 
her,  in  which  you  could  account  for  the  details  that 
earlier  had  seemed  to  point  to  foul  play.  My  own 
notion  is  that  she  fled  blindly,  with  no  light  in  her 
eyes — no  ghastly  glimmer  of  catastrophe  to  come. 
She  had  covered  her  tracks  completely  because  she 
had  wished  to  be  completely  lost.  She  didn't  wish 
Filippo  to  have  even  the  satisfaction  of  knowing 
whether  she  was  alive  or  dead.  Some  of  her  dust- 
throwing — the  unused  ticket,  for  example — resulted 
in  damning  evidence  against  Filippo.  After  that, 
coincidence  labored  faithfully  at  his  undoing.  No 
one  knows,  even  now,  whose  body  it  was  that 
passed  for  Rachel  Upcher's.  All  other  clues  were 
abandoned  at  the  time  for  the  convincing  one  that 
led  to  her.  I  have  sometimes  wondered  why  I  didn't 
ask  her  more  questions :  to  whom  she  had  originally 
given  the  marked  underclothing,  for  example.  It 
might  have  gone  far  toward  identifying  what  the 
Country  Club  grounds  had  so  unluckily  given  up. 
But  to  lead  those  tortured  fragments  of  bone  and 
flesh  into  another  masquerade  would  have  been  too 
grotesque.  And  at  that  moment,  in  the  wavering, 
119 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

unholy  lamplight  of  the  half-bare,  half-tawdry  room 
— the  whole  not  unlike  one  of  Goya's  foregrounds — 
justice  and  the  public  were  to  me  equally  unreal. 
What  I  realized  absolutely  was  that  so  long  as  Rachel 
Upcher  lived,  I  might  not  speak.  Horror  that  she 
was,  she  had  somehow  contrived  to  be  the  person 
who  must  be  saved.  I  would  have  dragged  her  by 
the  hair  to  the  prison  gates,  had  there  been  any 
chance  of  saving  Filippo — at  least,  I  hope  I  should. 
But  Filippo  seemed  to  me  at  the  moment  so  entirely 
lucky  that  to  avenge  him  didn't  matter.  I  think  I 
felt,  sitting  opposite  that  Fury  in  pink,  something 
of  their  own  emotion.  Filippo  was  happier,  tout 
bonnement,  in  another  world  from  her;  and  to  do 
anything  to  bring  them  together — to  hound  her 
into  suicide,  for  example — would  be  to  play  him  a 
low  trick.  I  could  have  drunk  to  her  long  life  as 
she  sat  there  before  me.  It  matters  little  to  most  of 
us  what  the  just  ghosts  think;  how  much  less  must 
our  opinion  matter  to  them!  No;  Rachel  Upcher, 
even  as  I  counted  her  spots  and  circles,  was  safe 
from  me.  I  didn't  want  to  know  anything  definitely 
incriminating  about  her  flight,  anything  that  would 
120 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

bring  her  within  the  law,  or  impose  on  me  a  citizen's 
duties.  Citizens  had  already  bungled  the  situation 
enough.  If  she  had  prepared  the  trap  for  Filippo, 
might  that  fact  be  forever  unknown!  But  I  really 
do  not  believe  that  she  had.  What  she  had  done 
was  to  profit  shamelessly  (a  weak  word !)  by  coinci 
dence.  I  have  often  wondered  if  Rachel  Upcher  never 
wavered,  never  shuddered,  during  those  months  of 
her  wicked  silence.  That  question  I  even  put  to  her 
then,  after  a  fashion.  "It  was  long,"  she  answered; 
"but  I  should  do  it  all  again.  He  was  horrible." 
What  can  you  do  with  hatred  like  that?  He  had  been 
to  her,  as  she  to  him,  actual  infection.  "Poison  .  .  . 
and  I  am  poisoned."  Filippo's  words  to  me  would 
have  served  his  wife's  turn  perfectly.  There  was,  in 
the  conventional  sense,  for  all  her  specific  com 
plaints,  no  "cause."  She  hated  him,  not  for  what  he 
did  but  for  what  he  was.  She  would  have  done  it 
all  again.  The  mere  irony  of  her  action  would  have 
been  too  much  for  some  women;  but  Rachel  Up 
cher  had  no  ironic  sense — only  a  natural  and  Ibsen- 
enhanced  power  of  living  and  breathing  among 
unspeakable  emotions.  And  she  plucked  at  those 
121 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

ribands,   those   laces,   with   the   delicate,    hovering 
fingers  of  a  ghoul. 

It  is  all  so  long  ago  that  I  could  not,  if  I  would, 
give  you  the  exact  words  in  which,  at  length,  she 
made  all  this  clear.  Neither  my  mind  nor  my  pen 
took  any  stenographic  report  of  that  conversation. 
I  have  given  such  phrases  as  I  remember.  The  im 
pression  is  there  for  life,  however.  Besides,  there  is 
no  man  who  could  not  build  up  for  himself  any 
amount  of  literature  out  of  that  one  naked  fact: 
that  Rachel  Upcher  knew  her  husband's  plight,  and 
that  she  lay,  mute,  breathless,  concealed,  in  her  lair, 
lest  she  should,  by  word  or  gesture,  save  him.  She 
took  the  whole  trial,  from  accusation  to  sentence, 
for  a  piece  of  sublime,  unmitigated  luck — a  beauti 
ful  blunder  of  Heaven's  in  her  behalf.  That  she 
thought  of  herself  as  guilty,  I  do  not  believe;  only 
as — at  last! — extremely  fortunate.  At  least,  as  her 
tale  went  on,  I  heard  less  and  less  any  accent  of 
hesitation.  She  knew — oh,  perfectly — how  little  any 
one  else  would  agree  with  her.  She  was  willing  to 
beg  my  silence  in  any  attitude  of  humility  I  chose  to 
demand.  But  Rachel  Upcher  would  never  accuse 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

herself.  I  asked  no  posturing  of  her.  She  got  my 
promise  easily  enough.  Can  you  imagine  my  going 
hotfoot  to  wake  Letitia  with  the  story?  No  more 
than  that  could  I  go  to  wake  New  York  with  it. 
Rachel  Upcher,  calmed  by  my  solemn  promise 
(though,  if  you'll  believe  it,  her  own  recital  had 
already  greatly  calmed  her),  left  me  to  seek  re 
pose.  I  watched  her  fluttering,  sinister  figure  down 
the  corridor,  then  came  back  to  my  infected  room. 
She  had  not  touched  the  pile  of  newspapers.  I 
spent  the  night  reading  Ibsen;  and  in  the  morning 
managed  so  that  we  got  off  early.  Mrs.  Wace  did 
not  come  down  to  breakfast,  and  I  did  not  see  her 
again.  Young  Floyd  was  in  the  devil  of  a  temper, 
but  his  temper  served  admirably  to  facilitate  our 
departure.  He  abandoned  ranch  affairs  entirely  to 
get  us  safely  on  our  way.  Our  sick  horse  was  in  per 
fectly  good  condition,  and  would  have  given  us  no 
possible  excuse  for  lingering.  Letitia,  out  of  sight  of 
the  ranch,  delivered  herself  of  a  hesitating  comment. 

"  Do  you  know,  Richard,  I  have  an  idea  that  Mrs. 
Wace  is  not  really  a  nice  woman?" 

I,  too,  had  broken  Mrs.  Wace's  bread,  but  I  did 
123 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

not  hesitate.  "I  think  you  are  undoubtedly  right, 
Letitia." 

It  was  the  only  thing  I  have  ever,  until  now, 
been  able  to  do  to  avenge  Filippo  Upcher.  Even 
when  I  learned  (I  always  had  an  arrangement  by 
which  I  should  learn,  if  it  occurred)  of  Mrs.  Floyd's 
death,  I  could  still  do  nothing.  There  was  poor 
Evie,  who  never  knew,  and  who,  as  I  say,  could  not 
have  borne  it. 

I  shall  be  much  blamed  by  many  people,  no 
doubt,  for  having  promised  Rachel  Upcher  what 
she  asked.  I  can  only  say  that  any  one  else,  in  my 
place,  would  have  done  the  same.  They  were  best 
kept  apart:  I  don't  know  how  else  to  put  it.  I  shall 
be  blamed,  too,  for  not  seizing  my  late,  my  twelfth- 
hour  opportunity  to  eulogize  Filippo  Upcher — for 
not,  at  least,  trying  to  explain  him.  There  would  be 
no  point  in  trying  to  account  for  what  happened  by 
characterizing  Filippo.  Nothing  could  account  for 
.  such  hatred:  it  was  simply  a  great  natural  fact. 
They  combined,  like  chemical  agents,  to  that  mon 
strous  result.  Each  was,  to  the  other,  poison.  I  tell 
the  truth  now  because  no  one  has  ever  doubted  Up- 


THE    WINE    OF    VIOLENCE 

cher's  guilt,  and  it  is  only  common  fairness  that 
he  should  be  cleared.  Why  should  I,  for  that  reason, 
weave  flatteries  about  him?  He  did  not  murder  his 
wife;  but  that  fact  has  not  made  it  any  easier  to 
call  him  "Filippo,"  which  I  have  faithfully  done 
since  I  encountered  Rachel  Upcher  in  southern 
California.  If  truth  is  the  order  of  the  day,  let  me 
say  the  other  tiling  that  for  years  I  have  not  been 
at  liberty  to  say:  he  was  a  frightful  bounder. 


125 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

PROBABLY  the  least  wise  way  to  begin  a  ghost- 
story  is  to  say  that  one  does  not  believe  in  ghosts. 
It  suggests  that  one  has  never  seen  the  real  article. 
Perhaps,  in  one  sense,  I  never  have;  yet  I  am  tempted 
to  set  down  a  few  facts  that  I  have  never  turned  over 
to  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research  or  discussed  at 
my  club.  The  fact  is  that  I  had  ingeniously  forgotten 
them  until  I  saw  Harry  Medway,  the  specialist — my 
old  classmate — a  few  years  ago.  I  say  "forgotten"; 
of  course,  I  had  not  forgotten  them,  but,  in  order  to 
carry  on  the  business  of  life,  I  had  managed  to  record 
them,  as  it  were,  in  sympathetic  ink.  After  I  heard 
what  Harry  Medway  had  to  say,  I  took  out  the  loose 
sheets  and  turned  them  to  the  fire.  Then  the  writing 
came  out  strong  and  clear  again — letter  by  letter, 
line  by  line,  as  fatefully  as  Belshazzar's  *'  immortal 
postscript."  Did  I  say  that  I  do  not  believe  in 
ghosts?  Well — I  am  getting  toward  the  end,  and  a 
129 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

few  inconsistencies  may  be  forgiven  to  one  who  is 
not  far  from  discoveries  that  will  certainly  be  incon 
sistent  with  much  that  we  have  learned  by  heart  in 
this  interesting  world.  Perhaps  it  will  be  pardoned 
me  as  a  last  flicker  of  moribund  pride  if  I  say  that 
in  my  younger  days  I  was  a  crack  shot,  and  to  the 
best  of  my  belief  never  refused  a  bet  or  a  drink  or 
an  adventure.  I  do  not  remember  ever  having  been 
afraid  of  a  human  being;  and  yet  I  have  known  fear. 
There  are  weeks,  still,  when  I  live  in  a  bath  of  it.  I 
think  I  will  amend  my  first  statement,  and  say  in 
stead  that  I  do  not  believe  in  any  ghosts  except  my 
own — oh,  and  in  Wender's  and  Lithway's,  of  course. 
Some  people  still  remember  Lithway  for  the  sake 
of  his  charm.  He  never  achieved  anything,  so  far 
as  I  know,  except  his  own  delightful  personality. 
He  was  a  classmate  of  mine,  and  we  saw  a  great 
deal  of  each  other  both  in  and  after  college — until 
he  married,  indeed.  His  marriage  coincided  with  my 
own  appointment  to  a  small  diplomatic  post  in  the 
East;  and  by  the  time  that  I  had  served  my  appren 
ticeship,  come  into  my  property,  resigned  from  the 
service,  and  returned  to  America,  Li th way's  wife 
130 


OX    THE    STAIRCASE 

had  suddenly  and  tragically  died.  I  had  never  seen 
her  but  once — on  her  wedding-day — but  I  had  rea 
son  to  believe  that  Lithway  had  every  right  to  be 
as  inconsolable  as  he  was.  If  he  had  ever  had  any 
ambition  in  his  own  profession,  which  was  law,  he 
lost  it  all  when  he  lost  her.  He  retired  to  the  sub 
urban  country,  where  he  bought  a  new  house  that 
had  just  been  put  up.  He  was  its  first  tenant,  I  re 
member.  That  fact,  later,  grew  to  seem  important. 
There  he  relapsed  into  a  semi-populated  solitude, 
with  a  few  visitors,  a  great  many  books,  and  an  inor 
dinate  amount  of  tobacco.  These  details  I  gathered 
from  TYender  in  town,  while  I  was  adjusting  my 
affairs. 

Never  had  an  inheritance  come  so  pat  as  mine. 
There  were  all  sorts  of  places  I  wanted  to  go  to,  and 
now  I  had  money  enough  to  do  it.  The  wanderlust 
had  nearly  eaten  my  heart  out  during  the  years 
when  I  had  kicked  my  heels  in  that  third-rate  lega 
tion.  I  wanted  to  see  Lithway,  but  a  dozen  minor 
catastrophes  prevented  us  from  meeting  during  those 
breathless  weeks,  and  as  soon  as  I  could  I  positively 
had  to  be  off.  Youth  is  like  that.  So  that,  although 
131 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

Lithway's  bereavement  had  been  very  recent,  at  the 
time  when  I  was  in  America  settling  my  affairs  and 
drawing  the  first  instalment  of  my  beautiful  income — 
there  is  no  beauty  like  that  of  unearned  increment 
— I  did  not  see  him  until  he  had  been  a  widower  for 
more  than  two  years. 

The  first  times  I  visited  Lithway  were  near  to 
gether.  I  had  begun  what  was  to  be  my  almost  life 
long  holiday  by  spending  two  months  alone — save 
for  servants — on  a  house-boat  in  the  Vale  of  Cash 
mere;  and  my  next  flights  were  very  short.  When  I 
came  back  from  those,  I  rested  on  level  wing  at 
Braythe.  Lithway  was  a  little  bothered,  on  one  of 
these  occasions,  about  the  will  of  a  cousin  who  had 
died  in  Germany,  leaving  an  orphan  daughter,  a 
child  of  six  or  seven.  His  conscience  troubled  him 
sometimes,  and  occasionally  he  said  he  ought  to  go 
over  and  see  that  the  child's  inheritance  was  prop 
erly  administered.  But  there  was  an  aunt — a  moth 
er's  sister — to  look  after  the  child,  and  her  letters 
indicated  that  there  was  plenty  of  money  and  a 
good  lawyer  to  look  after  the  investments.  Since  his 
wife's  death,  Lithway  had  sunk  into  lethargy.  He 
132 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

had  enough  to  live  on,  and  he  drew  out  of  business 
entirely,  putting  everything  he  had  into  government 
bonds.  When  he  hadn't  energy  enough  left  to  cut  off 
coupons,  he  said,  he  should  know  that  it  was  time 
for  him  to  commit  suicide.  He  really  spoke  as  if  he 
thought  that  final  indolence  might  arrive  any  day. 
I  read  the  aunt's  letters.  She  seemed  to  be  a  good 
sort,  and  the  pages  reeked  of  luxury  and  the  ma 
ternal  instinct.  I  rather  thought  it  would  be  a  good 
excuse  to  get  Lithway  out  of  his  rut,  and  advised 
him  to  go;  but,  when  he  seemed  so  unwilling,  I 
couldn't  conscientiously  say  I  thought  the  duty  im 
perative.  I  had  long  ago  exhausted  Germany — I  had 
no  instinct  to  accompany  him. 

Lithway,  then,  was  perfectly  idle.  His  complete 
lack  of  the  executive  gift  made  him  an  incomparable 
host.  He  had  been  in  the  house  three  years,  and  I 
was  visiting  him  there  for  perhaps  the  third  time, 
when  he  told  me  that  it  was  haunted.  He  didn't 
seem  inclined  to  give  details,  and,  above  all,  didn't 
seem  inclined  to  be  worried.  He  sat  up  very  late 
always,  and  preferably  alone,  a  fact  that  in  itself 
proved  that  he  was  not  nervous.  As  I  said,  I  had 
133 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

never  been  interested  in  ghosts,  and  the  newness  of 
the  house  robbed  fear  of  all  seriousness.  Ghosts  bat 
ten  on  legend  and  decay.  There  wasn't  any  legend, 
and  the  house  was  almost  shockingly  clean.  When  he 
told  me  of  the  ghost,  then,  I  forbore  to  ask  for  any 
more  information  than  he,  of  his  own  volition,  gave 
me.  If  he  had  wanted  advice  or  assistance,  he  would, 
of  course,  have  said  so.  The  servants  seemed  utterly 
unaware  of  anything  queer,  and  servants  leave  a 
haunted  house  as  rats  a  sinking  ship.  It  really  did 
not  seem  worth  inquiring  into.  I  referred  occasion 
ally  to  Lithway's  ghost  as  I  might  have  done  to  a 
Syracusan  coin  which  I  should  know  him  proud  to 
possess  but  loath  to  show. 

On  my  return  from  Yucatan,  one  early  spring, 
Lithway  welcomed  me  as  usual.  He  seemed  lazier 
than  ever,  and  I  noticed  that  he  had  moved  his 
books  down  from  a  second-story  to  a  ground-floor 
room.  He  slept  outdoors  summer  and  winter,  and 
he  had  an  outside  stairway  built  to  lead  from  his 
library  up  to  the  sleeping-porch.  A  door  from  the 
sleeping-porch  led  straight  into  his  dressing-room.  I 
laughed  at  his  arrangements  a  little. 
134 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"You  live  on  this  side  of  the  house  entirely  now 
— cut  off,  actually,  from  the  other  side.  What  is  the 
matter  with  the  east?" 

He  pointed  out  to  me  that  the  dining-room  and 
the  billiard-room  were  on  the  eastern  side  and  that 
he  never  shunned  them.  "It's  just  a  notion,"  he  said. 
"Mrs.  Jayne"  (the  housekeeper)  "sleeps  on  the 
second  floor,  and  I  don't  like  to  wake  her  when  I  go 
up  at  three  in  the  morning.  She  is  a  light  sleeper." 

I  laughed  outright.  "Lithway,  you're  getting  to 
be  an  old  maid." 

It  was  natural  that  I  should  dispose  my  effects  hi 
the  rooms  least  likely  to  be  used  by  Lithway.  I  took 
over  his  discarded  up-stairs  study,  and,  with  a  bed 
room  next  door,  was  very  comfortable.  He  assured 
me  that  he  had  no  reason  to  suppose  I  should 
ever  be  disturbed  in  either  room.  Moving  his  own 
things,  he  said,  had  been  purely  a  precautionary 
measure  in  behalf  of  Mrs.  Jayne.  Curiously  enough, 
I  was  perfectly  sure  that  his  first  statement  was 
absolutely  true  and  his  second  absolutely  false.  Only 
the  first  one,  however,  seemed  to  be  really  my 
affair.  I  could  hardly  complain. 
135 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

Lithway  did  seem  changed;  but  I  have  such  an 
involuntary  trick  of  comparing  my  rediscovered 
friends  with  the  human  beings  I  have  most  recently 
been  seeing  that  I  did  not  take  the  change  too  seri 
ously.  He  was  perfectly  unlike  the  Yucatan  Indians ; 
but,  on  reflection,  why  shouldn't  he  be,  I  asked  my 
self.  Probably  he  had  always  been  just  like  that.  I 
couldn't  prove  that  he  hadn't.  Yet  I  did  think  there 
was  something  back  of  his  listlessness  other  than 
mere  prolonged  grief  for  his  wife.  Occasionally,  I  con 
fess,  I  thought  about  the  ghost  in  this  connection. 

One  morning  I  was  leaving  my  sitting-room  to  go 
down  to  Lithway's  library.  The  door  of  the  room 
faced  the  staircase  to  the  third  story,  and  as  I  came 
out  I  could  always  see,  directly  opposite  and  above 
me,  a  line  of  white  banisters  that  ran  along  the  narrow 
third-story  hall.  Mechanically,  this  time,  I  looked  up 
and  saw — I  need  not  say,  to  my  surprise — a  burly 
negro  leaning  over  the  rail  looking  down  at  me.  The 
servants  were  all  white,  and  the  man  had,  besides, 
a  very  definite  look  of  not  belonging  there.  He  didn't, 
in  any  way,  fit  into  his  background.  I  ran  up  the 
stairs  to  investigate.  When  I  got  just  beneath  him, 
136 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

he  bent  over  towards  me  with  a  malicious  gesture.  All 
I  saw,  for  an  instant,  was  a  naked  brown  arm  holding 
up  a  curious  jagged  knife.  The  edge  caught  the  little 
light  there  was  in  the  dim  hall  as  he  struck  at  me. 
I  hit  back,  but  he  had  gone  before  I  reached  him — 
simply  ceased  to  be.  There  was  no  Cheshire-cat  van 
ishing  process.  I  was  staring  again  into  the  dim  hall, 
over  the  white  banisters.  There  were  no  rooms  on 
that  side  of  the  hall,  and  consequently  no  doors. 

A  light  broke  in  on  me.  I  went  down-stairs  to 
Lithway.  "I've  seen  your  ghost,"  I  said  bluntly. 

What  seemed  to  be  a  great  relief  relaxed  his  fea 
tures.  "You  have!  And  isn't  she  extraordinary?" 

"She?" 

"You  say  you've  seen  her,"  he  went  on  hurriedly. 

"Her?  Him,  man — black  as  Tartarus.  And  he  cut 
me  over  the  head." 

"There?"    Lithway   drew   his   finger   down   the 
place. 

"Yes.  How  did  you  know?  I  don't  feel  it  now." 

"Look  at  yourself." 

He  handed  me  a  mirror.  The  slash  was  indicated 
clearly  by  a  white  line,  but  there  was  no  abrasion. 
137 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"That  is  very  interesting,"  I  managed  to  say; 
but  I  really  did  not  half  like  it. 

Lithway  looked  at  me  incredulously.  "She  has 
never  had  a  weapon  before,"  he  murmured. 

"She?  This  was  a  man." 

"Oh,  no!"  he  contradicted.  "That's  impossible." 

"He  was  a  hairy  brute  and  full-bearded  besides," 
I  calmly  insisted. 

Lithway  jumped  up.  "My  God!  there's  some  one 
in  the  house."  He  caught  up  a  revolver.  "Let  us  go 
and  look.  He'll  have  made  off  with  the  silver." 

"Look  here,  Lithway,"  I  protested.  "I  tell  you 
this  man  wasn't  real.  He  vanished  into  thin  air — 
like  any  other  ghost." 

"But  the  ghost  is  a  woman."  He  was  as  stupid  as 
a  child  about  it. 

"Then  there  are  two."  I  didn't  really  believe  it, 
but  it  seemed  clear  that  we  could  never  settle  the 
dispute.  Each  at  least  would  have  to  pretend  to  be 
lieve  the  other  for  the  sake  of  peace. 

"Suppose  you  tell  me  about  your  ghost,"  I  sug 
gested  soothingly.  But  Lithway  was  dogged,  and  we 
had  to  spend  an  hour  exploring  the  house  and  count- 
138 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

ing  up  Lithway's  valuables.  Needless  to  say,  there 
was  no  sign  of  invasion  anywhere.  At  the  end  of  the 
hour  I  repeated  my  demand.  The  scar  was  begin 
ning  to  fade,  I  noted  in  the  mirror,  though  still 
clearly  visible. 

"  Suppose  you  tell  me  about  your  ghost.  You  never 
have,  you  know." 

"I've  only  seen  her  a  few  times." 

"Where?" 

"Leaning  over  the  banisters  in  the  third-floor 
hall." 

"What  is  she  like?" 

"A  slip  of  a  girl.  Rather  fair  and  drooping,  but  a 
strange  look  in  her  eyes.  Dressed  in  white,  with  a 
blue  sash.  That's  all." 

"Does  she  speak?" 

"No;  but  she  waves  a  folded  paper  at  me." 

"What  time  of  day  have  you  seen  her?" 

"About  eleven  in  the  morning." 

The  clocks  were  then  striking  twelve. 

"Well,"  I  ventured,  "that's  clearly  the  ghost's 
hour.  But  the  two  of  them  couldn't  be  more  differ 
ent." 

139 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

He  made  me  describe  the  savage  again.  The  ex 
traordinary  part  of  it  was  that,  in  spite  of  his  baffling 
blackness,  I  could  do  so  perfectly.  He  was  as  indi 
vidual  to  me  as  a  white  man — more  than  that,  as  a 
friend.  He  had  personality,  that  ghost. 

"What  race  should  you  say  he  was?" 

I  thought.  "Some  race  I  don't  know;  Zulu,  per 
haps.  A  well-built  beggar." 

"And  you're  perfectly  sure  he  was  real — I  mean, 
wasn't  human?" 

The  distinction  made  me  smile,  though  the  ques 
tion  irritated  me.  "You  can  see  that  if  his  object 
was  murder  he  made  a  poor  job.  You  found  all  your 
silver,  didn't  you?"  Then  I  played  my  trump-card. 
"And  do  you  suppose  that  a  burglar  would  wander 
round  this  countryside  in  a  nose-ring  and  a  loin 
cloth?  Nice  disguise!" 

Lithway  looked  disturbed.  "But  the  other  one," 
he  murmured.  "I  don't  understand  the  other." 

"She  seems  much  easier  to  understand  than  mine," 
I  protested. 

"Oh,  I  don't  mean  her!"  he  said.  "I  mean  it" 

For  the  first  time  I  began  to  be  afraid  that  Lith- 
140 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

way  had  left  the  straight  track  of  common  sense.  It 
was  silly  enough  to  have  two  ghosts  in  a  new  house 
— but  three! 

"It?"  I  asked. 

"The  one  Wender  saw." 

"Oh!  Wender  has  seen  one?" 

"Six  months  ago.  I've  never  been  able  to  get  him 
here  since.  It  was  rather  nasty,  and  Wender — well, 
Wender's  sensitive.  And  he's  a  little  dotty  on  the 
occult,  in  any  case." 

"Did  he  see  it  at  eleven  in  the  morning?" 

Lithway  seemed  irritated.  "Of  course!"  he 
snapped  out.  He  spoke  as  if  the  idiosyncrasy  of 
his  damned  house  had  a  dignity  that  he  was  bound 
to  defend. 

"And  what  was  it?" 

"A  big  rattlesnake,  coiled  to  strike." 

Even  then  I  could  not  take  it  seriously.  "That's 
not  a  ghost;  it's  a  symptom." 

"It  did  strike,"  Lithway  went  on. 

"Did  he  have  a  scar?" 

"No.  He  couldn't  even  swear  that  it  quite  touched 
him." 

141 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"Then  why  did  it  worry  him?" 

Lithway  hesitated.  "I  suppose  the  uncertain- 
ty " 

"Uncertainty!  If  there's  anything  less  dreadful 
than  an  imaginary  snake  that  has  struck,  it  is  an 
imaginary  snake  that  hasn't  struck.  What  has  got 
into  Wender?" 

"Fear,  apparently,"  said  Lithway  shortly.  "He 
won't  come  back.  Says  a  real  rattlesnake  probably 
wouldn't  get  into  a  house  in  Braythe  more  than 
once,  but  an  unreal  rattlesnake  might  get  in  any 
day.  I  don't  blame  him." 

"May  I  ask,"  I  said  blandly,  "if  you  are  so  far 
gone  that  you  think  rattlesnakes  have  ghosts?" 

Lithway  lost  his  temper.  "If  you  want  to  jeer  at 
the  thing,  for  God's  sake  have  the  manners  not  to 
do  it  in  this  house!  I  tell  you  we  have  all  three  seen 
ghosts." 

"The  ghost  of  a  rattlesnake,"  I  murmured  to  my 
self.  "It  beats  everything!"  And  I  looked  once  more 
into  the  mirror.  The  scar  that  the  knife  had  made  was 
still  perceptible,  but  very  faint.  "Did  you  hunt  the 
house  over  for  the  snake?" 
142 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

"Of  course  we  did." 

"Did  you  find  it?" 

"Of  course  we  didn't — any  more  than  we  found 
your  Zulu." 

"Then  why  did  you  insist  so  on  hunting  the 
Zulu?" 

Lithway  colored  a  little.  "Well,  to  tell  the  truth, 
I  never  wholly  believed  in  that  snake.  If  you  or 
Wender  had  only  seen  her,  now!" 

"I  don't  see  why  Wender  was  so  worried,"  I  said. 
"After  all,  a  snake  might  have  got  in — and  got  out." 

"He  saw  it  twice,"  explained  Lithway. 

"Symptoms,"  I  murmured.  "Had  he  ever  had  an 
adventure  with  a  rattlesnake?" 

"No." 

"Then  why  should  it  make  him  nervous?" 

"I  suppose" — Lithway  looked  at  me  a  little  cau 
tiously,  I  thought — "just  because  he  never  had  seen 
one.  He  said,  I  remember,  that  that  rattlesnake 
hadn't  been  born  yet." 

I  laughed.  "Wender  is  sensitive.  The  ghost  of  a 
rattlesnake  that  has  never  lived — well,  you  can't  be 
more  fantastic  than  that!" 
143 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"Wender  has  a  theory,"  Lithway  said. 

But  he  seemed  actually  to  want  to  change  the 
subject.  Accordingly,  I  did  change  it — a  little.  I 
didn't  really  care  for  Wender 's  theories.  I  had  heard 
some  of  them.  They  included  element als. 

"Tell  me  some  more  about  yours.  She's  the  most 
convincing  of  the  three.  Do  you  recognize  her?" 

"Never  saw  any  one  that  looked  remotely  like 
her." 

"And  you  are  the  first  occupant  of  this  house,"  I 
mused.  "Was  she  dressed  in  an  old-fashioned  way?" 

Lithway  actually  blushed.  "She  is  dressed  rather 
oddly — her  hair  is  done  queerly.  I've  hunted  the 
fashion-books  through,  and  I  can't  find  such  a  fash 
ion  anywhere  in  the  last  century.  I'm  not  in  the 
least  afraid,  but  I  am  curious  about  her,  I  admit." 

"Was  Wender's  rattlesnake  old-fashioned?" 

Lithway  got  up.  "See  here,"  he  said,  "I'm  not 
going  to  stand  jollying.  That's  the  one  thing  I  am 
afraid  of.  Should  you  like  to  hear  Wender's  theory?" 

"Not  I,"  I  said  firmly.  "He  believes  in  two  kinds 
of  magic — white  and  black — and  has  eaten  the  fruit 
of  the  mango-tree  that  a  fakir  has  just  induced  to 
144 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

grow  out  of  the  seed  before  his  eyes.  He  told  me 
once  that  devils  were  square.  I'm  not  in  the  least 
interested  in  Wender's  rattlesnake.  The  wonder  is, 
with  his  peculiar  twist  of  mind,  that  he  doesn't 
insist  on  living  in  this  house." 

"He  particularly  hates  snakes,"  answered  Lith- 
way.  "He  was  hoping  to  see  her,  but  he  never  could. 
Nor  you,  apparently." 

"How  often  do  you  see  her?" 

"About  once  in  six  months." 

"And  you're  not  afraid?" 

"Well — she  doesn't  do  anything  to  me,  you  know." 
He  was  very  serious. 

"Probably  couldn't  hurt  you  if  she  did — a  young- 
thing  like  that.  But  wrhy  don't  you  move  out?" 

Lithway  frankly  crimsoned.  "I — like  her." 

"In  spite  of  her  eyes?" 

"In  spite  of  her  eyes.  And — I've  thought  that  look 
in  them  might  be  the  cross  light  on  the  staircase." 

I  burst  out  laughing.  "Lithway,  come  away  with 
me.  Solitude  is  getting  on  your  nerves.  We'll  go  to 
Germany  and  look  after  your  little  cousin  and  the 
aunt  who  writes  such  wonderful  letters." 
145 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"No."  Lithway  was  firm.  "It's  too  much  like 
work." 

I  was  serious,  for  he  really  seemed  to  me,  at  the 
time  of  this  visit,  in  rather  a  bad  way.  I  urged  him 
with  every  argument  I  could  think  of.  He  had  no 
counter-arguments,  but  finally  he  broke  out:  "Well, 
if  you  will  have  it,  I  feel  safer  here." 

"You've  never  seen  her  anywhere  else,  have  you?  " 

"No." 

"Then  this  seems  to  be  the  one  point  of  danger." 

"Wender's  theory  is  that — "  he  began. 

But  I  persisted  in  not  hearing  Wender's  theory. 
Even  when,  a  week  later,  my  own  experience  was 
exactly  duplicated  and  I  had  spent  another  day  in 
watching  a  white  line  fade  off  my  forehead,  I  still 
persisted.  But,  as  Lithway  wouldn't  leave  the  house, 
I  did.  I  began  even  to  have  a  sneaking  sympathy 
for  Wender.  But  I  didn't  want  to  hear  his  theory. 
Indeed,  to  this  day  I  never  have  heard  it.  Oddly 
enough,  though,  I  should  be  willing  to  wager  a  good 
sum  that  it  was  accurate. 

I  was  arranging  for  a  considerable  flight — some 
thing  faddier  and  more  dangerous  than  I  had  hitherto 
146 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

attempted — and  to  a  friend  as  indolent  as  Lithway 
I  could  only  prepare  to  bid  a  long  farewell.  He  pos 
itively  refused  to  accompany  me  even  on  the  earlier 
and  less  difficult  stages  of  my  journey.  "I'll  stick 
to  my  home,"  he  declared.  It  was  a  queer  home  to 
want  to  stick  to,  I  thought  privately,  especially  as 
the  ghost  was  obviously  local.  He  had  never  seen 
an  apparition  except  at  Braythe — nor  had  I,  nor 
had  Wender.  I  worried  about  leaving  him  there,  for 
the  one  danger  I  apprehended  was  the  danger  of 
overwrought  nerves;  but  Lithway  refused  to  budge, 
and  you  can't  coerce  a  sane  and  able-bodied  man 
with  a  private  fortune.  I  did  carry  my  own  precau 
tions  to  the  point  of  looking  up  the  history  of  the 
house.  The  man  from  whom  Lithway  had  bought 
it,  while  it  was  still  unfinished,  had  intended  it  for  his 
own  occupancy;  but  a  lucrative  post  in  a  foreign 
country  had  determined  him  to  leave  America.  The 
very  architect  was  a  churchwarden,  the  husband  of 
one  wife  and  the  father  of  eight  children.  I  even 
hunted  up  the  contractor :  not  one  accident  had  oc 
curred  while  the  house  was  building,  and  he  had 
employed  throughout,  most  amicably,  union  labor 
147 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

on  its  own  terms.  It  was  silly  of  me,  if  you  like,  but 
I  had  really  been  shaken  by  the  unpleasant  powers 
of  the  place.  After  my  researches  it  seemed  clear 
that  in  objecting  to  it  any  further  I  shouldn't  have 
a  leg  to  stand  on.  In  any  case,  Lithway  would  prob 
ably  rather  live  in  a  charnel-house  than  move.  I  had 
to  wash  my  hands  of  it  all. 

The  last  weeks  of  my  visit  were  perfectly  unevent 
ful,  both  for  Lithway  and  me — as  if  the  house,  too, 
were  on  its  guard.  I  came  to  believe  that  there  was 
nothing  in  it,  and  if  either  of  us  had  been  given  to 
drinking,  I  should  have  called  the  eleven-o'clock  vis 
itation  a  new  form  of  hang-over.  I  was  a  little  in 
clined,  in  defiance  of  medical  authorities,  to  consider 
it  an  original  and  interesting  form  of  indigestion. 
By  degrees  I  imposed  upon  myself  to  that  extent. 
I  did  not  impose  on  myself,  however,  to  the  extent 
of  wanting  to  hear  Wender  talk  about  it;  and  I  still 
blush  to  think  how  shallow  were  the  excuses  that  I 
mustered  for  not  meeting  him  at  any  of  the  times 
that  he  proposed. 

This  is  a  bad  narrative,  for  the  reason  that  it  must 
be  so  fragmentary.  It  is  riddled  with  lapses  of  time. 
148 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

Ghosts  may  get  in  their  fine  work  in  an  hour,  but 
they  have  always  been  preparing  their  coup  for  years. 
Every  ghost,  compared  with  us,  is  Methuselah.  We 
have  to  fight  in  a  vulnerable  and  dissolving  body; 
but  they  aren't  pressed  for  time.  They've  only  to 
lie  low  until  the  psychologic  moment.  Oh,  I'd  under 
take  to  accomplish  almost  anything  if  you'd  give 
me  the  ghost's  chance.  If  he  can't  get  what  he  wants 
out  of  this  generation,  he  can  get  it  out  of  the  next. 
Grand  thing,  to  be  a  ghost! 

It  was  some  years  before  I  went  back  to  Braythe. 
Wender,  I  happen  to  know,  never  went  back.  Lith- 
way  used  to  write  me  now  and  then,  but  seldom 
referred  to  my  adventure.  He  couldn't  very  well, 
since  the  chief  burden  of  his  letters  was  always 
"When  are  you  coming  to  visit  me?"  Once,  when  I 
had  pressed  him  to  join  me  for  a  season  in  Japan, 
he  virtually  consented,  but  at  the  last  moment  I  got 
a  telegram,  saying:  "I  can't  leave  her.  Bon  voyage!" 
That  didn't  make  me  want  to  go  back  to  Braythe. 
I  was  worried  about  him,  but  his  persistent  refusal 
to  act  on  any  one's  advice  made  it  impossible  to  do 
anything  for  him.  I  thought  once  of  hiring  some  one 
149 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

to  burn  the  house  down;  but  Lithway  wouldn't  leave 
it,  and  I  didn't  want  to  do  anything  clumsy  that 
would  imperil  him.  I  was  much  too  far  away  to 
arrange  it  neatly.  I  suggested  it  once  to  Wender, 
when  we  happened  to  meet  in  London,  and  he  was 
exceedingly  taken  with  the  idea.  I  half  hoped,  for  a 
moment,  that  he  would  do  it  himself.  But  the  next 
afternoon  he  came  back  with  a  lot  of  reasons  why 
it  wouldn't  do — he  had  been  grubbing  in  the  Brit 
ish  Museum  all  day.  I  very  nearly  heard  Wender's 
theory  that  time,  but  I  pleaded  a  dinner  engagement 
and  got  off. 

You  can  imagine  that  I  was  delighted  when  I 
heard  from  Lithway,  some  years  after  my  own  en 
counter  with  the  savage  on  the  staircase,  that  he 
had  decided  to  pull  out  and  go  to  Europe.  He  had 
the  most  fantastic  reasons  for  doing  it — this  time 
he  wrote  me  fully.  It  seems  he  had  become  convinced 
that  his  apparition  was  displeased  with  him — didn't 
like  the  look  in  her  eyes,  found  it  critical.  As  he 
wasn't  doing  anything  in  particular  except  live  like 
a  hermit  at  Braythe,  the  only  thing  he  could  think 
of  to  propitiate  her  was  to  leave.  Perhaps  there  was 
150 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

a  sort  of  withered  coquetry  in  it,  too;  he  may  have 
thought  the  lady  would  miss  him  if  he  departed  and 
shut  up  the  house.  You  see,  by  this  time  she  was 
about  the  most  real  thing  in  his  life.  I  don't  defend 
Lithway;  but  I  thought  then  that,  whatever  the  im 
pelling  motive,  it  would  be  an  excellent  thing  for 
him  to  leave  Braythe  for  a  time.  Perhaps,  once  free 
of  it,  he  would  develop  a  normal  and  effectual  re 
pugnance  to  going  back,  and  then  we  should  all  have 
our  dear,  delightful  Lithway  again.  I  wrote  trium 
phantly  to  Wender,  and  he  replied  hopefully,  but 
on  a  more  subdued  note. 

Lithway  came  over  to  Europe.  He  wrote  to  me, 
making  tentative  suggestions  that  I  should  join  him; 
but,  as  he  refused  to  join  me  and  I  didn't  care  at  all 
about  the  sort  of  thing  he  was  planning,  we  didn't 
meet.  I  was  all  for  the  Peloponnesus,  and  he  was  for  a 
wretched  tourist's  itinerary  that  I  couldn't  stomach. 
I  hoped  to  get  him  in  the  end  to  wander  about  in 
more  interesting  places,  but  as  he  had  announced 
that  he  was  going  first  to  Berlin  to  look  up  the  little 
cousin  and  her  maternal  aunt,  I  thought  I  would 
wait  until  he  had  satisfied  his  clannish  conscience. 
151 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

Then,  one  fine  day,  his  old  curiosity  would  waken, 
and  we  should  perhaps  start  out  together  to  get  new 
impressions.  That  fine  day  never  dawned,  however. 
He  lingered  on  in  Germany,  following  his  relatives 
to  Marienbad  when  they  left  Berlin  for  the  sum 
mer.  I  hoped,  with  each  mail,  that  he  would  an 
nounce  his  arrival  in  some  spot  where  I  could 
conceivably  meet  him;  but  the  particular  letter  an 
nouncing  that  never  came.  He  was  quite  taken  up 
with  the  cousins.  He  said  nothing  about  going  home, 
and  I  was  thoroughly  glad  of  that,  at  least. 

I  was  not  wholly  glad,  just  at  the  moment,  when  a 
letter  bounced  out  at  me  one  morning,  announcing 
that  he  was  to  marry  the  little  cousin — by  this  time, 
as  I  had  understood  from  earlier  correspondence,  a 
lovely  girl  of  eighteen.  I  had  looked  forward  to  much 
companionship  with  the  Lithway  I  had  known  of 
old,  when  he  should  be  free  of  his  obsession.  I  had 
thought  him  on  the  way  to  freedom;  and  here  he 
was,  caught  by  a  flesh-and-blood  damsel  who  thrust 
me  out  quite  as  decisively  as  the  phantasmal  lady 
on  the  staircase.  I  had  decency  enough  to  be  glad 
for  Lithway,  if  not  for  myself;  glad  that  he  could 

152 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

strike  the  old  idyllic  note  and  live  again  delightfully 
in  the  moment.  I  didn't  go  to  Berlin  to  see  them 
married,  but  I  sent  them  my  blessing  and  a  very 
curious  and  beautiful  eighteenth-century  clock.  I 
also  promised  to  visit  them  in  America.  I  felt  that, 
if  necessary,  I  could  face  Braythe,  now  that  the 
ghost  was  so  sure  to  be  laid.  No  woman  would  stay 
in  a  house  where  her  husband  was  carrying  on,  how 
ever  unwillingly,  an  affair  with  an  apparition;  and, 
as  their  address  remained  the  same,  I  believed  that 
the  ghost  had  given  up  the  fight. 

This  story  has  almost  the  gait  of  history.  I  have 
to  sum  up  decades  in  a  phrase.  It  is  really  the  span 
of  one  man's  whole  life  that  I  am  covering,  you  see. 
But  have  patience  with  me  while  I  skim  the  inter 
vening  voids,  and  hover  meticulously  over  the  vivid 
patches  of  detail.  ...  It  was  some  two  years  be 
fore  I  reached  Braythe.  I  don't  remember  particu 
larly  what  went  on  during  those  two  years;  I  only 
know  that  I  was  a  happy  wranderer.  I  was  always  a 
happy  wanderer,  it  seems  to  me  as  I  look  back  on 
life,  except  for  the  times  when  I  sank  by  Lithway's 
side  into  his  lethargy — a  lucid  lethargy,  in  which 
153 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

unaccountable  things  happened  very  quietly,  with 
an  utter  stillness  of  context.  I  do  know  that  I  was 
planning  a  hunting-trip  in  British  Central  Africa, 
and  wrote  Lithway  that  I  had  better  postpone  my 
visit  until  that  was  over.  He  seemed  so  hurt  to  think 
that  I  could  prefer  any  place  to  him  that  I  did  put 
it  off  until  the  next  year  and  made  a  point  of  going 
to  the  Lithways. 

I  had  no  forebodings  when  I  got  out  of  Lithway's 
car  at  his  gate  and  faced  the  second  Mrs.  Lithway, 
who  had  framed  her  beauty  in  the  clustering  wistaria 
of  the  porch.  I  was  immensely  glad  for  Lithway  that 
he  had  a  creature  like  that  to  companion  him.  Youth 
and  beauty  are  wonderful  things  to  keep  by  one's 
fireside.  There  was  more  than  a  touch  of  vicarious 
gratitude  in  my  open  admiration  of  Mrs.  Lithway. 
He  was  a  person  one  couldn't  help  wanting  good 
things  for;  and  one  felt  it  a  delicate  personal  atten 
tion  to  oneself  when  they  came  to  him. 

Nothing  changes  a  man,  however,  after  he  has 

once  achieved  his  type:  that  was  what  I  felt  most 

keenly,  at  the  end  of  the  evening,  as  I  sat  with 

Lithway  in  his  library.  Mrs.  Lithway  had  trailed  her 

154 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

light  skirts  up  the  staircase  with  incomparable  grace, 
smiling  back  at  us  over  her  shoulder;  and  I  had  gone 
with  Lithway  to  the  library,  wondering  how  long  I 
could  hold  him  writh  talk  of  anything  but  her.  I  soon 
saw  that  he  didn't  wish  to  talk  of  her.  That,  after 
all,  was  comprehensible — you  could  take  it  in  so 
many  ways ;  but  it  was  with  real  surprise  that  I  saw 
him  sink  almost  immediately  into  gloom.  Gloom  had 
never  been  a  gift  of  Lithway 's;  his  indolence  had 
always  been  shot  through  with  mirth.  Even  his  ab 
sorption  in  the  ghost  had  been  whimsical — almost 
as  if  he  had  deliberately  let  himself  go,  had  chosen 
to  be  obsessed.  I  didn't  know  what  to  make  of  the 
gloom,  the  unresilient  heaviness  with  which  he  met 
my  congratulations  and  my  sallies.  They  had  been 
perfect  together  at  dinner  and  through  the  early 
evening.  Now  he  fell  slack  in  every  muscle  and 
feature,  as  if  the  preceding  hours  had  been  a  dia 
bolic  strain.  I  wondered  a  little  if  he  could  be  wor 
ried  about  money.  I  supposed  Lithway  had  enough 
— and  his  bride  too,  if  it  came  to  that — though  I 
didn't  know  how  much.  But  one  could  not  be  long 
in  the  house  without  noticing  luxuries  that  had 
155 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

nothing  to  do  with  its  original  unpretending  com 
fort.  You  were  met  at  every  turn  by  some  aesthetic 
refinement  as  costly  as  the  lace  and  jewels  in  which 
Mrs.  Lithway's  own  loveliness  was  wrapped.  It  was 
evident  from  all  her  talk  that  her  standard  of  civiliza 
tion  was  very  high;  that  she  had  a  natural  attach 
ment  to  shining  non-essentials.  I  was  at  a  loss;  I  didn't 
know  what  to  say  to  him,  he  looked  so  tired.  Such 
silence,  even  between  Lithway  and  me,  was  awkward. 
Finally  he  spoke:  "Do  you  remember  my  ghost?" 
"I  remember  your  deafening  me  with  talk  of  her. 
I  never  saw  her." 

"No,  of  course  you  wouldn't  have  seen  her." 
"I  saw  one  of  my  own,  you  remember." 
"Oh,  yes!  A  black  man  who  struck  at  you.  You 
never  have  had  a  black  man  strike  at  you  in  real 
life,  have  you?"  He  turned  to  me  with  a  faint  flicker 
of  interest. 

"Never.  We  threshed  all  that  out  before,  you 
know.  I  never  even  saw  that  particular  nigger  ex 
cept  at  Bray  the." 

"You  will  see  him,  perhaps,  if  you  are  fool  enough 
to  go  to  British  Central  Africa,"  he  jerked  out. 

156 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"Perhaps,"  I  answered.  But  I  was  more  inter 
ested  in  Lithway's  adventure.  "Do  you  see  your 
ghost  now?"  I  had  been  itching  to  ask,  and  it  seemed 
to  me  that  he  had  given  me  a  fair  opening. 

Lithway  passed  his  hand  across  his  brows.  "I 
don't  know.  I'm  not  quite  sure.  Sometimes  I  think 
so.  But  I  couldn't  swear  to  it." 

"Has  she  grown  dimmer,  then — more  hazy?  You 
used  to  speak  of  her  as  if  she  were  a  real  woman 
coming  to  a  tryst:  flesh  and  blood,  at  the  least." 

He  looked  at  me  a  little  oddly.  "I'm  not  awfully 
well.  My  eyes  play  me  tricks  sometimes.  .  .  .  When 
you  got  off  the  train  to-night,  I  could  have  sworn 
you  had  a  white  scar  on  your  forehead.  As  soon  as 
we  got  out  here  and  I  had  a  good  look  at  you,  I 
saw  you  hadn't,  of  course."  Then  he  went  back.  "I 
don't  believe  I  really  do  see  her  now.  I  think  it  may 
be  an  hallucination  when  occasionally  I  think  I  do. 
Yes,  I'm  pretty  sure  that,  when  I  think  I  do,  it's 
pure  hallucination.  I  don't  like  it;  I  wish  she'd  either 
go  or  stay." 

"My  dear  fellow,  you  speak  as  if  she  had  ever, 
in  her  palmiest  days,  been  anything  but  an  hallucina- 
157 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

tion.  Did  you  get  to  the  point  of  believing  that  the 
girl  you  say  used  to  hang  over  the  staircase  was 
real?" 

"  She  was  more  real  than  the  one  that  sometimes 
I  see  there  now.  Oh,  yes,  she  was  real!  What  I  see 
now — when  I  see  it  at  all — is  just  the  ghost  of  her." 

"The  ghost  of  a  ghost!"  I  ejaculated.  "It's  as 
bad  as  Wender's  rattlesnake." 

Lithway  turned  to  me  suddenly.  "Where  is  Wen- 
der?" 

"Why,  don't  you  know?  Working  on  American 
archaeology  at  some  university — I  don't  know  which. 
He  hadn't  decided  on  the  place,  when  he  last  wrote. 
I  was  going  to  get  his  address  from  you." 

"  He  won't  come  here,  you  know.  And  Margaret's 
feelings  are  a  little  hurt — he  has  often  been  quite 
near.  So  there's  a  kind  of  official  coolness.  She  doesn't 
know  about  the  ghosts,  and  therefore  I  can't  quite 
explain  Wender's  refusals  to  her.  Of  course,  I  know 
it's  on  that  account;  he's  as  superstitious  as  a 
woman.  But  poor  Margaret,  I  suppose,  believes  he 
doesn't  approve  of  my  having  taken  a  wife.  She's  as 
sweet  as  possible  about  it,  but  I  can  see  she's  hurt. 
158 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

And  yet  I'd  rather  she  would  be  hurt  than  to  know 
about  the  house." 

"Why,  in  Heaven's  name,  don't  you  sell  it  and 
move,  Lithway?"  I  cried. 

He  colored  faintly.  "Margaret  is  very  fond  of  the 
place.  I  couldn't,  considering  its  idiosyncrasy,  sell 
with  a  good  conscience,  and  if  I  didn't  sell,  it  would 
mean  losing  a  pretty  penny — more,  certainly,  than 
Margaret  and  I  can  afford  to.  She  lost  most  of  her 
own  money,  you  know,  a  few  years  ago." 

"The  aunt?" 

"Oh,  dear,  no!"  He  said  it  rather  hastily.  "But 
you  were  quite  right  at  the  time.  I  ought  to  have 
gone  out  there  ten  years  ago.  Women  never  know 
how  to  manage  money." 

I  looked  him  in  the  eyes.  "Lithway,  anything  in 
the  world  is  better  than  staying  in  this  house.  You're 
in  a  bad  way.  You  admit,  yourself,  you're  not 
well.  And  Mrs.  Lithway  would  rather  cut  out  the 
motor  and  live  anywhere  than  have  you  go  to 
pieces." 

He  laughed.  "Tell  Margaret  that  I'm  going  to 
pieces — if  you  dare!" 

159 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"I'm  not  afraid  of  you,  even  if  I  should." 
"No;  but  wouldn't  you  be  afraid  of  her?" 
I  thought  of  the  utter  youth  of  Mrs.  Lithway; 
the  little  white  teeth  that  showed  so  childishly  when 
she  laughed;  her  small  white  hands  that  had  seemed 
so  weighed  down  with  a  heavy  piece  of  embroidery; 
her  tiny  feet  that  slipped  along  the  polished  floors 
— a  girl  that  you  could  pick  up  and  throw  out  of 
the  window. 

"Certainly  not.  Would  you?" 
"I  should  think  so!"  He  smiled.  "We've  been  very 
happy  here.  I  don't  think  she  would  like  to  move. 
I  shan't  suggest  it  to  her.  And  mind" — he  turned 
to  me  rather  sharply — "don't  you  hint  to  her  that 
the  house  is  the  uncanny  thing  you  and  that  fool 
Wender  seem  to  think  it  is." 

I  saw  that  there  was  no  going  ahead  on  that 
tack.  Beyond  a  certain  point,  you  can't  interfere 
with  mature  human  beings.  But  certainly  Lithway 
looked  ill;  and  if  he  admitted  ill  health,  there  must 
be  something  in  it.  It  was  extraordinary  that  Mrs. 
Lithway  saw  nothing.  I  was  almost  sorry — in  spite 
of  the  remembered  radiance  of  the  vision  on  the 
160 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

porch — that  Lithway  had  chosen  to  fall  in  love  with 
a  young  fool.  I  rose. 

"Love  must  be  blind,  if  your  wife  doesn't  see 
you're  pulled  down." 

"Oh,  love — it's  the  blindest  thing  going,  thank 
God!"  He  was  silent  for  a  moment.  "There  are  a 
great  many  things  I  can't  explain,"  he  said.  "But 
you  can  be  sure  that  everything's  all  right." 

I  was  quite  sure,  though  I  couldn't  wholly  have 
told  why,  that  everything  was  at  least  moderately 
wrong.  But  I  decided  to  say  nothing  more  that 
night.  I  went  to  bed. 

Lithway  was  ill;  only  so  could  I  account  for  his 
nervousness,  which  sometimes,  in  the  next  days, 
mounted  to  irritability.  He  was  never  irritable  with 
his  wife;  when  the  tenser  moods  were  on,  he  simply 
ceased  to  address  her,  and  turned  his  attention  to 
me.  We  motored  a  good  deal;  that  seemed  to  agree 
with  him.  But  one  morning  he  failed  to  appear  at 
breakfast,  and  Mrs.  Lithway  seemed  surprised  that 
I  had  heard  nothing  during  the  night.  He  had  had 
an  attack  of  acuter  pain — the  doctor  had  been  sent 
for.  There  had  been  telephoning,  running  to  and 
161 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

fro,  and  talk  in  the  corridors  that  no  one  had  thought 
of  keying  down  on  my  account.  I  was  a  little  ashamed 
of  not  having  waked,  and  more  than  a  little  cross 
at  not  having  been  called.  She  assured  me  that  I 
could  have  done  nothing,  and  apologized  as  prettily 
as  possible  for  having  to  leave  me  to  myself  during 
the  day.  Lithway  was  suffering  less,  but,  of  course, 
she  would  be  at  his  bedside.  Naturally,  I  made  no 
objections  to  her  wifely  solicitude.  I  was  allowed  to 
see  Lithway  for  a  few  minutes;  but  the  pain  was 
severe,  and  I  cut  my  conversation  short.  The  doctor 
suspected  the  necessity  for  an  operation,  and  they 
sent  to  New  York  for  a  consulting  specialist.  I  de 
termined  to  wait  until  they  should  have  reached 
their  gruesome  decision,  on  the  off  chance  that  I 
might,  in  the  event  of  his  being  moved,  be  of  ser 
vice  to  Mrs.  Lithway.  In  spite  of  her  calm  and 
sweetness,  and  the  perfect  working  of  the  household 
mechanism — no  flurry,  no  fright,  no  delays  or 
hitches — I  thought  her,  still,  a  young  fool.  Any 
woman,  of  any  age,  was  a  fool  if  she  had  not  seen 
Lithway  withering  under  her  very  eyes. 

It  was  a  dreary  day  during  which  we  waited  for 
162 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

the  New  York  physician;  one  of  those  days  when 
sunlight  seems  drearier  than  mist — a  monotonous 
and  hostile  glare.  I  tried  reading  Lithway's  books, 
but  the  mere  fact  that  they  were  his  got  on  my 
nerves.  I  decided  to  go  to  my  room  and  throw 
myself  on  the  resources  of  my  own  luggage.  There 
would  be  something  there  to  read,  I  knew.  I  closed 
the  library  door  quietly  and  went  up-stairs.  Out 
side  my  own  door  I  stopped  and  looked — involun 
tarily,  with  no  conscious  curiosity — up  to  the  third- 
story  hall.  There,  in  the  dim  corridor,  leaning  over 
the  balustrade  in  a  thin  shaft  of  sunlight  that  struck 
up  from  the  big  window  on  the  landing,  stood  Mrs. 
Lithway,  with  a  folded  paper  in  her  hand,  look 
ing  down  at  me.  I  did  not  wish  to  raise  my  voice 
— Lithway,  I  thought,  might  be  sleeping — so  did  not 
speak  to  her.  I  don't  think,  in  any  case,  I  should 
have  wanted  to  speak  to  her.  The  look  in  her  eyes 
was  distinctly  unpleasant — the  kind  of  look  people 
don't  usually  face  you  with.  I  remember  wondering, 
as  our  surprised  glances  met,  why  the  deuce  she 
should  hate  me  like  that — how  the  deuce  a  nice 
young  thing  could  hate  any  one  like  that.  It  must 
163 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

be  personal  to  me,  I  thought — no  nice  young  thing 
would  envisage  the  world  at  large  with  such  venom. 
I  turned  away;  and  as  I  turned,  I  saw  her,  out  of 
the  tail  of  my  eye,  walk,  with  her  peculiar  lightness 
of  step,  along  the  upper  corridor  to  the  trunk-loft. 
She  had  the  air  of  being  caught,  of  not  having  wished 
to  be  seen.  I  opened  my  bedroom  door  immediately, 
but  as  I  opened  it  I  heard  a  sound  behind  me.  Mar 
garet  Lithway  stood  on  the  threshold  of  her  hus 
band's  room,  with  an  empty  bottle. 

"Would  you  mind  taking  the  car  into  the  village 
and  getting  this  filled  again?"  she  asked.  Her  eyes 
had  dark  shadows  beneath  them;  she  had  evidently 
not  slept,  the  night  before. 

I  flatter  myself  that  I  did  not  betray  to  her  in 
any  way  my  perturbation.  Indeed,  the  event  had 
fallen  on  a  mind  so  ripe  for  solutions  that,  in  the 
very  instant  of  my  facing  her,  I  realized  that  what 
I  had  just  seen  above-stairs  (and  seen  by  mistake, 
I  can  assure  you;  she  had  fled  from  me)  was  Lith- 
way's  old  ghost — no  less.  I  took  the  bottle,  read 
the  label,  and  assured  Mrs.  Lithway  that  I  would 
go  at  once.  Mrs.  Lithway  was  wrapped  in  a  darkish 
164 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

house-gown  of  some  sort.  The  lady  in  the  upper 
hall  had  been  in  white,  with  a  blue  sash.  ...  I 
was  very  glad  when  I  saw  Mrs.  Lithway  go  into  her 
husband's  room  and  shut  the  door.  I  was  having 
hard  work  to  keep  my  expression  where  it  belonged. 
For  five  minutes  I  stood  in  the  hall;  five  minutes  of 
unbroken  stillness.  Then  I  went  to  the  garage,  or 
dered  out  the  car,  and  ran  into  the  village,  where 
I  presented  the  bottle  to  the  apothecary.  He  filled 
it  immediately.  As  I  re-entered  the  house,  the  great 
hall  clock  struck;  it  was  half  past  eleven.  I  sent  the 
stuff — lime-water,  I  believe — up  to  Mrs.  Lithway 
by  a  servant,  went  into  my  room,  and  locked  the 
door. 

I  cannot  say  that  I  solved  the  whole  enigma  of 
Bray  the  in  the  hour  before  luncheon;  but  I  faced 
for  the  first  time  the  seriousness  of  a  situation  that 
had  always  seemed  to  me,  save  for  Lithway's  curi 
ous  reactions  upon  it,  more  than  half  fantastic,  if 
not  imaginary.  I  had  seen,  actually  seen,  Lithway's 
ghost.  I  had  not  been  meant  to  see  her;  and  I  was 
inclined  to  regret  the  sudden  impulse  that  had 
led  me  to  leave  Lithway's  library  and  go  to  my 
165 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

own  room.  The  identity  of  the  "ghost"  with  Mrs. 
Lithway  was  appalling  to  me — the  more  so,  that 
there  could  have  been  no  mistake  about  the  nature 
of  the  personality  that  had  reluctantly  presented 
itself  to  my  vision.  I  found  myself  saying:  "Could 
that  look  in  her  eyes  be  the  cross  light  on  the  stairs?  " 
and  then  suddenly  remembered  that  I  was  only 
echoing  the  Lithway  of  years  ago.  It  was  incredible 
that  any  man  should  have  liked  the  creature  I  had 
seen;  and  I  could  account  for  Lithway's  long  and 
sentimental  relation  with  the  apparition  only  by 
supposing  that  he  had  never  seen  her,  as  I  had, 
quite  off  her  guard.  But  if,  according  to  his  hint  of 
the  night  before,  he  had  come  to  confound  the  ghost 
with  the  real  woman — what  sort  of  marriage  was 
that?  I  asked  myself.  The  ghost  was  a  bad  lot, 
straight  through.  It  brought  me  into  the  realm  of 
pure  horror.  The  event  explained — oh,  I  raised  my 
hands  to  wave  away  the  throng  of  things  it  explained ! 
Indeed,  until  I  could  talk  once  more  with  Lithway, 
I  didn't  want  to  face  them;  I  didn't  want  to  see 
clear.  I  had  a  horrid  sense  of  being  left  alone  with 
the  phantoms  that  infested  the  house:  alone,  with  a 
166 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

helpless,  bedridden  friend  to  protect.  Mrs.  Lithway 
didn't  need  protection — that  was  clearer  than  any 
thing  else.  Mrs.  Lithway  was  safe. 

Before  night,  the  consultation  had  been  held,  and 
it  was  decided  that  Lithway  should  be  rushed 
straight  to  town  for  an  operation.  The  pain  was  not 
absolutely  constant;  he  had  tranquil  moments;  but 
the  symptoms  were  alarming  enough  to  make  them 
afraid  of  even  a  brief  delay.  We  were  to  take  him 
up  the  next  morning.  To  all  my  offers  of  help,  Mrs. 
Lithway  gave  a  smiling  refusal.  She  could  manage 
perfectly,  she  said.  I  am  bound  to  say  that  she  did 
manage  perfectly,  thinking  of  everything,  never  los 
ing  her  head,  unfailingly  adequate,  though  the  shad 
ows  under  her  eyes  seemed  to  grow  darker  hour  by 
hour.  A  nurse  had  come  down  from  town,  but  I 
could  hardly  see  what  tasks  Mrs.  Lithway  left  to 
the  nurse.  I  did  my  best,  out  of  loyalty  to  the  loyal 
Lithway,  to  subdue  my  aversion  to  his  wife.  I  hoped 
that  my  aversion  was  quite  unreasonable  and  that, 
safe  in  Europe,  I  should  feel  it  so.  I  ventured  to  say, 
after  dinner,  that  I  hoped  she  would  try  to  get  some 
sleep. 

167 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

"Oh,  yes,  I  shall!"  She  smiled.  "There  wiU  be  a 
great  deal  to  do  to-morrow;  and  the  day  after,  when 
they  operate,  will  be  a  strain.  There's  nothing  harder 
than  waiting  outside.  I  know."  Her  eyes  filled,  but 
she  went  on  very  calmly.  "I  am  so  grateful  to  you 
for  being  here  and  for  going  up  with  us.  I  have  no 
people  of  my  own,  you  know,  to  call  on.  You  have 
been  the  greatest  comfort."  She  gave  me  a  cool 
hand,  said  "good  night,"  and  left  me. 

I  do  not  know  whether  or  not  Mrs.  Lithway  slept, 
but  I  certainly  did  not,  save  in  fitful  dozes.  I  was 
troubled  about  Lithway :  I  thought  him  in  very  bad 
shape  for  an  operation;  and  I  had,  besides,  name 
less  forebodings  of  every  sort.  It  was  a  comfort,  the 
next  morning,  to  hear  him,  through  an  open  door, 
giving  practical  suggestions  to  his  wife  and  the  nurse 
about  packing  his  things.  I  went  in  to  see  him  before 
we  started  off.  The  doctor  was  down-stairs  with  Mrs. 
Lithway. 

"Sorry  to  let  you  in  for  this,  my  boy.  But  you  are 
a  great  help." 

"Mrs.  Lithway  is  wonderful,"  I  said.  "I  congrat 
ulate  you." 

His  sombre  eyes  held  me.  "Ah,  you  will  never 
168 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

know  how  wonderful — never!"  He  said  it  with  a 
kind  of  brooding  triumph,  which,  at  the  moment,  I 
did  not  wholly  understand.  Now,  long  afterwards, 
I  think  I  do. 

I  left  him,  and  crossed  the  corridor  to  my  own 
room.  A  slight  rustle  made  me  turn.  Mrs.  Lithway 
stood  in  the  upper  hall,  looking  down  at  me — the 
same  creature,  to  every  detail  of  dress,  even  to  the 
folded  paper  in  her  hand,  that  I  had  seen  the  pre 
vious  morning.  This  time  I  braced  myself  to  face 
the  ghost,  to  examine  her  with  a  passionate  keenness. 
I  hoped  to  find  her  a  less  appalling  creature.  But, 
at  once,  Mrs.  Lithway  leaned  over  the  rail  and  spoke 
to  me — a  little  sharply,  I  remember. 

"Would  you  please  telephone  to  the  garage  and 
say  that  the  doctor  thinks  we  ought  to  start  ten 
minutes  earlier  than  we  had  planned?  I  shall  be 
down  directly." 

The  hand  that  held  the  paper  was  by  this  time 
hidden  in  the  folds  of  her  skirt.  She  turned  and  sped 
lightly  along  the  corridor  to  the  trunk-loft.  Save  for 
the  voice,  it  was  a  precise  repetition  of  what  had 
happened  the  day  before. 

"Certainly,"  I  said;  but  I  did  not  turn  away  until 
169 


ON   THE    STAIRCASE 

she  had  disappeared  into  the  trunk-loft.  I  went  to 
the  telephone  and  gave  the  message;  it  took  only  a 
few  seconds.  Then  I  went  to  my  own  room,  leaving 
the  door  open  so  that  I  commanded  the  hall.  In  a 
few  minutes  Mrs.  Lithway  came  down  the  stairs 
from  the  third  story.  "Did  you  telephone?"  she 
asked  accusingly,  as  she  caught  my  eye.  I  bowed. 
She  passed  on  into  Lithway's  room.  There  was  no 
paper  in  her  hand.  I  knew  that  this  time  there  had 
been  no  ghost. 

Well.  .  .  .  Lithway,  as  every  one  knows,  died 
under  the  ether.  His  heart  suddenly  and  unaccount 
ably  went  back  on  him.  He  left  no  will;  and,  as 
he  had  no  relations  except  the  cousin  whom  he  had 
married,  everything  went  to  her.  I  had  once,  be 
fore  his  second  marriage,  seen  a  will  of  Lithway's, 
myself;  but  I  didn't  care  to  go  into  court  with  that 
information,  especially  as  in  that  will  he  had  left 
me  his  library.  I  should  have  liked,  for  old  sake's 
sake,  to  have  Lithway's  library.  His  widow  sold  it, 
and  it  is  by  now  dispersed  about  the  land.  She 
told  me,  after  the  funeral,  that  she  should  go  on  at 
Bray  the,  that  she  never  wanted  to  leave  it;  but, 
170 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

for  whatever  reason,  she  did,  after  a  few  years,  sell 
the  place  suddenly  and  go  to  Europe.  I  have  never 
happened  to  see  her  since  she  sold  it,  and  I  did  not 
know  the  people  she  sold  it  to.  The  house  was 
burned  many  years  ago,  I  believe,  and  an  elaborate 
golf-course  now  covers  the  place  where  it  stood.  I 
have  not  been  to  Braythe  since  poor  Lithway  was 
buried. 

I  took  the  hunting-trip  that  Lithway  had  been  so 
violently  and  inexplicably  opposed  to.  I  think  I  was 
rather  a  fool  to  do  it,  for  I  ought  to  have  realized, 
after  Lithway's  death,  the  secret  of  the  house,  its 
absolutely  unique  specialty.  But  such  is  the  peacock 
heart  of  man  that  I  still,  for  myself,  trusted  in 
"common  sense" — in  my  personal  immunity,  at 
least,  from  every  supernatural  law.  Indeed,  it  was 
not  until  I  had  actually  encountered  my  savage, 
and  got  the  wound  I  bear  the  scar  of,  that  I  gave 
entire  credence  to  Lithway's  tragedy.  I  put  some 
time  into  recovering  from  the  effect  of  that  mid 
night  skirmish  in  the  jungle,  and  during  my  recov 
ery  I  had  full  opportunity  to  pity  Lithway. 

It  became  quite  clear  to  me  that  the  presences 
171 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

at  Bray  the  concerned  themselves  only  with  major 
dooms.  If  Lithway's  ghost  had  been  his  wife,  his 
wife  must  have  been  a  bad  lot.  I  am  as  certain  as 
I  can  be  of  anything  that  he  was  exceedingly  un 
happy  with  her.  It  was  a  thousand  pities  that,  for 
so  many  years,  he  had  misunderstood  the  vision; 
that  he  had  permitted  himself — for  that  was  what 
it  amounted  to — to  fall  in  love  with  her  in  advance. 
She  was,  quite  literally,  his  "fate."  Of  course,  by 
this  time,  I  feel  sure  that  he  couldn't  have  escaped 
her.  I  don't  believe  the  house  went  in  for  kindly 
warnings;  I  think  it  merely,  with  the  utmost  inso 
lence,  foretold  the  inevitable  and  dared  you  to  es 
cape  it.  If  I  hadn't  gone  out  for  big  game  in  Africa, 
I  am  quite  sure  that  my  nigger  would  have  got  at 
me  somewhere  else — even  if  he  had  to  be  a  cannibal 
out  of  a  circus  running  amuck  down  Broadway.  That 
was  the  trick  of  the  house :  the  worst  thing  that  was 
going  to  happen  to  you  leered  at  you  authentically 
over  that  staircase.  I  have  never  understood  why  I 
saw  Lithway's  apparition;  but  I  can  bear  witness  to 
the  fact  that  she  was  furious  at  my  having  seen  her 
— as  furious  as  Mrs.  Lithway  was,  the  next  day,  if 

172 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

it  comes  to  that.  It  was  a  mistake.  My  step  may 
have  sounded  like  Lithway 's.  Who  knows?  At  least 
it  should  be  clear  what  Lithway  meant  when  he  said 
that  he  didn't  always  know  whether  he  saw  her  or 
not.  The  two  were  pin  for  pin  alike.  The  apparition, 
of  course,  had,  from  the  beginning,  worn  the  dress 
that  Mrs.  Lithway  was  to  wear  on  the  day  that 
Lithway  was  taken  to  the  hospital.  I  have  never 
liked  to  penetrate  further  into  the  Lithways'  inti 
mate  history.  I  am  quite  sure  that  the  folded  paper 
was  the  old  will,  but  I  have  always  endeavored,  in  my 
own  mind,  not  to  implicate  Margaret  Lithway  more 
than  that.  Of  course,  there  could  never  have  been 
any  question  of  implicating  her  before  the  public. 

I  never  had  a  chance,  after  my  own  accident,  to 
consult  Wender.  I  stuck  to  Europe  unbrokenly  for 
many  years,  as  he  stuck  to  America.  Both  Wender 
and  I,  I  fancy,  were  chary  of  writing  what  might, 
have  been  written.  Some  day,  I  thought,  we  would 
meet  and  have  the  whole  thing  out;  but  that  day 
never  came.  Suddenly,  one  autumn,  I  had  news  of 
his  death.  He  was  a  member  of  a  summer  expedition 
in  Utah  and  northern  Arizona — I  think  I  mentioned 
173 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

that  he  had  gone  in  for  American  ethnology.  There 
are,  as  every  one  knows,  rich  finds  in  our  western 
States  for  any  one  who  will  dig  long  enough;  and 
they  were  hoping  to  get  aboriginal  skulls  and  mum 
mies.  All  this  his  sister  referred  to  when  she  wrote 
me  the  particulars  of  his  death.  She  dwelt  with  for 
givable  bitterness  on  the  fact  of  Wender's  having 
been  told  beforehand  that  the  particular  section  he 
was  assigned  to  was  free  from  rattlesnakes.  "Perhaps 
you  know,"  she  wrote,  "that  my  brother  had  had, 
since  childhood,  a  morbid  horror  of  reptiles."  I  did 
know  it — Lithway  had  told  me.  Wender's  death 
from  the  bite  of  a  rattlesnake  was  perhaps  the  most 
ironic  of  the  three  adventures;  for  Wender  was  the 
one  of  us  who  put  most  faith  in  the  scenes  produced 
on  the  stage  of  Braythe.  I  never  heard  Wender's 
theory;  but  I  fancy  he  realized,  as  Lithway  and  I 
did  not,  that  since  the  "ghosts"  we  saw  were  not 
of  the  past  they  must  be  of  the  future — a  most  logi 
cal  step,  which  I  am  surprised  none  of  us  should 
have  taken  until  after  the  event. 

Wender's  catastrophe  killed  in  me  much  of  my 
love  of  wandering.  At  least,  it  drove  me  to  Harry 
174 


ON    THE    STAIRCASE 

Medway;  and  Harry  Medway  did  the  rest.  I  am 
not  afraid  of  another  warrior's  cutting  at  me  with 
his  assegai;  but  I  do  not  like  to  be  too  far  from  spe 
cialists.  I  have  already  been  warned  that  I  may  some 
time  go  blind;  and  I  know  that  other  complications 
may  be  expected.  Pathology  and  surgery  are  sealed 
books  to  me;  but  I  still  hold  so  far  to  logic  that  I 
fully  expect  to  die  some  time  as  an  indirect  result 
of  that  wound.  The  scar  reminds  me  daily  that  its 
last  word  has  not  been  said. 

I  am  a  fairly  old  man — the  older  that  I  no  longer 
wander,  and  that  I  cling  so  weakly  to  the  great 
capitals  which  hold  the  great  physicians.  The  only 
thing  that  I  was  ever  good  at  I  can  no  longer  do. 
Curiosity  has  died  in  me,  for  the  most  part;  one  or 
.two  such  mighty  curiosities  have  been,  you  see,  al 
ready  so  terribly  appeased.  But  I  think  I  would  rise 
from  my  death-bed,  and  wipe  away  with  my  own 
hand  the  mortal  sweat  from  my  face,  for  the  chance 
of  learning  what  it  was  that  drove  Mrs.  Lithway,  in 
midwinter,  from  Braythe.  If  I  could  once  know  what 
she  saw  on  the  staircase,  I  think  I  should  ask  no 
more  respite.  The  scar  might  fulfil  its  mission. 
175 


THE    TORTOISE 


THE    TORTOISE 

"  1HERE  are  only  three  things  worth  while — 
fighting,  drinking,  and  making  love."  It  was  Chal 
mers  who  said  it  to  me  as  we  came  out  of  the  the 
atre,  and  were  idling  along  towards  the  club.  We 
had  been  seeing  a  very  handsome — almost  elegant 
— melodrama.  Very  impressionable  chap,  Chalmers, 
I  thought,  for  I  was  quite  sure  that  he  had  never 
done  any  fighting;  he  was  apparently  a  total  ab 
stainer;  and  he  positively  ran — as  whole-heartedly 
as  a  frightened  cow — from  a  petticoat. 

"What  about  work?"  I  asked,  as  we  turned  into 
the  club.  Chalmers  is  a  fiend  for  work:  always  shut 
up  in  his  laboratory,  dry-nursing  an  experiment. 

"Work   is   an  anodyne — a  blooming   anodyne." 

He  hunched  his  shoulders,  and  his  brown  coat — 

the  coat  of  a  toilsome  recluse,  if  ever  there  was  one; 

there's  something  peculiarly  unworldly  about  brown 

179 


THE    TORTOISE 

tweed  for  a  man's  wear — creased  into  lumpier  curves 
than  ever. 

"It's  a  mighty  slow  one.  If  I  wanted  a  quick 
effect,  I  think  I'd  take  to  cocaine.  Must  be  excit 
ing,  slewing  round  the  corners  of  Montmartre, 
dropping  your  francs  into  a  basket  that  swings 
down  from  God  knows  where,  with  the  blessed  stuff 
all  in  it  waiting  to  be  inhaled.  And  all  over  inside 
of  a  year."  Thus  I  to  Chalmers,  knowing  that  we 
were  very  far  from  Montmartre.  Chalmers,  I  should 
say,  was  magnificently  dependable;  you  were  as 
safe  in  dropping  a  lurid  suggestion  on  him  as  on 
the  shell  of  an  ancient  turtle.  I  rather  liked  that 
idea,  which  struck  me  just  then;  in  fact,  his  clothes 
were  much  the  color  of  tortoise-shell. 

"But  I  don't  want  it  over.  You  see  .  .  .  I've 
agreed  to  hang  on."  His  keen  glance  at  me,  more 
than  his  words,  savored  of  explanation. 

"Oh!"  I  made  the  syllable  as  non-committal  as 
possible.  The  lips  at  one  moment  so  fluent  in  con 
fession  will  grow  stiff  with  resentment  after  the  hour 
of  confidence  is  over.  For  that  reason,  I  dislike  to 
have  people  tell  me  things:  I  always  expect  that 
180 


THE    TORTOISE 

they  will  some  day  hate  me,  merely  because  they 
told. 

We  sat  down  at  a  table,  and  I  ordered  a  high 
ball.  Chalmers  fussed  for  a  moment,  and  then  com 
mitted  himself  to  a  pate  sandwich  with  apollinaris. 
I  didn't  think  of  asking  him  to  join  me.  We  had 
been  trying  for  five  years  to  get  Chalmers  to  take  a 
drink.  For  a  year,  there  were  always  bets  going  on 
it;  but  it  had  been  a  long  time  now  since  any  of 
us  had  made  or  lost  anything  on  the  chance  of 
Chalmers's  potations. 

At  the  same  time,  my  curiosity  was  aroused. 
There  had  never  been  any  mystery  about  Chalmers. 
There  isn't  any  about  a  tortoise,  if  it  comes  to  that. 
The  beast  has  been  made  much  of  mythologically, 
I  believe;  but  even  in  India  they  only  accuse  him 
of  holding  up  the  world.  No  one  pretends,  so  far 
as  I  know,  that  he  keeps  anything  under  his  shell 
except  himself.  But  Chalmers  didn't  seem  to  be 
even  bearing  a  burden.  He  was  simply  Chalmers. 
He  had  come  among  us,  an  accredited  student  of 
physics,  with  letters  of  introduction  from  German 
professors  and  Colonial  Dames;  he  had  performed 
181 


THE    TORTOISE 

the  absolutely  necessary  conventional  duties;  he 
was  vaguely  related  to  people  that  every  one  knew; 
he  was  so  obviously  a  gentleman  that  no  one  would 
ever  have  thought  of  affirming  it.  His  holidays 
were  all  accounted  for — in  fact,  he  usually  spent 
them  with  one  or  another  of  our  own  group.  There 
wasn't — there  isn't  now — a  single  thing  about  Chal 
mers  that  any  one  could  have  the  instinct  to  inves 
tigate.  It  had  never  occurred  to  any  of  us  that  we 
didn't  know  as  much  about  Chalmers  as  we  did 
about  the  people  we  had  been  brought  up  with. 
We  happened  not  to  have  been  brought  up  with 
him,  because  he  had  happened  to  be  brought  up 
abroad.  His  father  had  been  a  consul  somewhere. 

On  this  occasion,  anyhow,  my  curiosity  got  the 
better  of  my  fixed  rule.  I  decided  to  lead  Chalmers  on. 

"Do  you  mean  to  say  that  your  noble  industry 
is  nothing  but  a  poor  substitute  for  a  drug?" 

He  smiled  quaintly.  His  green  eyes  shone  under 
his  dark  eyelashes.  Very  taking  eyes  they  were: 
well  set  in  his  head  and  pleasantly  intimate,  with  a 
near-sighted  brilliancy. 

"I  didn't  say  it  was  a  poor  substitute.  And,  any- 
182 


THE    TORTOISE 

how,  cocaine  might  charm  away  the  hours,  but  only 
work  can  charm  away  the  years.  I've  got  into  my 
stride — for  eternity,  it  would  seem.  And  some  day, 
you  know,  I  may,  quite  incidentally,  do  something 
in  spectrum  analysis  that  will  be  significant.  I've 
got  all  the  time  in  the  world." 

"Are  you  so  sure?" 

"Well — it  looks  as  if  I  were  in  for  a  long  wait." 

He  spoke  as  unconcernedly  as  if  he  had  his  lease 
of  life  locked  up  in  his  safe-deposit  drawer. 

I  drank  some  whiskey  and  waited  a  minute, 
wondering  whether  to  push  his  confidence  over  the 
edge,  send  it  spinning  into  an  abyss  of  revelation. 
Finally,  I  decided. 

"I  didn't  know  that  anything  but  a  contract 
with  the  devil  could  make  you  so  sure." 

"Oh,  it  doesn't  have  to  be  with  the  devil."  He 
sipped  his  virtuous  apollinaris.  "Did  you  notice  the 
heroine's  sister?"  he  went  on. 

I  hadn't  noticed  her  much.  I  had  been  paying 
my  money  to  see  Maude  Lansing  act,  and  my  fru 
gal  eyes  had  attached  themselves  to  her  exclusively, 
from  the  first  act  to  the  last. 
183 


THE    TORTOISE 

"A  vague  little  blonde  thing,  wasn't  she?" 

"Blonde,  but  not  so  vague  as  you'd  think.  At 
least,  I  don't  think  she'd  be  vague  if  you  gave  her 
anything  to  do.  She  had  to  be  vague  to-night,  of 
course.  But  didn't  you  see  her  deliberately  subdu 
ing  herself  to  the  part — holding  herself  in,  so  as 
not  to  be  too  pretty,  too  angry,  too  subtle,  too 
much  in  love?  She  did  everything  vaguely,  I  imag 
ine,  so  as  not  to  hog  the  stage.  But  give  her  a  chance, 
and  she'd  play  up.  I  was  always  expecting,  you 
know,  that  she  would  hog  the  stage.  She  could  have 
done  it.  ...  It  quite  got  me  going." 

"Did  you  think  her  better  than  Maude  Lansing?" 
It  was  something  new,  at  least,  to  have  him  notice 
a  woman  so  closely. 

Chalmers  tasted  his  pate  and  half-nodded  ap 
provingly  at  it. 

"Oh,  I  don't  know  anything  about  that.  She  is 
the  only  woman  I  have  ever  seen  who  looked  like 
the  girl  I  married." 

I  set  down  my  glass  quickly.  I  had  drunk  most 
of  the  whiskey,  and  therefore  none  of  it  was  spilled. 
Chalmers  married!  Why — why — we  knew  all  about 
184 


THE   TORTOISE 

him,  from  cradle  to  laboratory;  or,  at  least,  as  much 
as  men  do  know  of  other  men  who  have  no  scrapes 
to  be  got  out  of.  I  looked  narrowly  at  Chalmers. 
Was  it  possible  that  he  had  been  lying  low  all 
these  years,  with  the  single  intention  of  perpetrating 
eventually  the  supreme  joke?  And  if  he  was  merely 
a  humorist  of  parts,  why  had  he  not  assembled  the 
crowd?  Why  had  he  selected  only  one  of  his  in 
timates?  His  intimates!  That  was  precisely  what 
we  were.  Yet  none  of  us  knew  that  he  had  been 
married.  Chalmers  himself  might  easily  not  have 
mentioned  a  dead  wife,  but  no  end  of  people,  first 
and  last,  had  turned  up  and  contributed  to  Chal 
mers's  biography,  and  it  was  odd  that  none  of 
them  should  have  mentioned  his  bereavement. 
Unless 

"No  one  knows  I  am  married.  No  one  has  ever 
known.  If  I  told  you  all  about  it,  you'd  see  why. 
And  I  think  I  shall.  That  girl  started  it  all  up 
again." 

He  leaned  across  the  table  and  laid  his  hand  on 
my  arm.  His  eyes  glinted  encouragingly  at  me. 
"Cheer  up,  old  man!  You're  not  in  for  anything 
185 


THE    TORTOISE 

sordid.  But  curious — oh,  very,  very  curious!  Yes, 
I  think,  without  vanity,  I  may  say  very  curious. 
...  I  meant  what  I  said  just  now,  coming  out  of 
the  theatre.  There  aren't  but  three  things  worth 
while — and  I  mayn't  have  them.  I  mayn't  fight,  be 
cause  I  might  get  killed  before  I've  a  right  to;  I  don't 
drink,  for  the  sake  of  the  paltry  hours  that  might 
be  subtracted  from  the  sum  of  my  years  if  I  did;  and, 
being  married,  I  naturally  can't  very  well  make  love. 
Can  I?"  He  turned  on  me  with  such  a  tone  of  ingen 
uous  query  that  I  wondered  if  it  was  a  joke,  after  all. 
I  tried  to  be  cynical.  "That  depends  ..." 
"Oh,  no,  it  doesn't!"  It  was  the  old  Chalmers 
who  smiled  at  me — ingratiating,  youthful,  adven 
turous,  gay.  I  had  often  wondered  why  Chalmers 
looked  adventurous,  his  habits  being,  if  ever  any 
man's  were,  regular  to  the  point  of  monotony.  It 
occurred  to  me  now  that  perhaps  he  looked  adven 
turous  because  he  had  had  his  adventure  already. 
In  any  case,  it  was  very  satisfactory  to  find  at  last 
something  in  his  life  that  matched  with  the  look 
in  his  eyes — something  that  would  take  the  curse 
off  his  even  temperament  and  equable  ways. 
186 


THE    TORTOISE 

"Very,  very  curious,"  he  repeated.  "And  all  these 
years  I've  wanted  to  tell  somebody,  just  in  case 
I  should  drop  out  suddenly.  I've  left  written  instruc 
tions,  but  I  should  really  like  some  one  to  under 
stand.  It's  all  rather  preposterous." 

"It's  preposterous  that  you  should  suddenly  be 
married." 

"Yes — of  course.  Well — I've  got  on  pretty  well, 
and  I'd  rather  you  didn't  mention  it  to  any  of  the 
others.  But  if  anything  should  turn  up,  you  can  say 
you  knew  it  all  along." 

"Fire  ahead." 

On  the  strength  of  the  narrative  about  to  come, 
I  ordered  another  high-ball.  Sometimes  you  want 
something  to  fiddle  with,  something  to  intervene  be 
tween  you  and  your  friend  when  it  is  hard  for  eyes 
to  meet.  But  he  had  promised  me  that  it  should  be 
nothing  sordid,  and  when  the  drink  came  I  set  it 
trustfully  to  one  side — in  reserve,  as  it  were. 

"Time  was,  when  I  knocked  about  the  world  a 

bit.  My  parents  were  dead,  I  had  no  close  kin,  and 

there   was   money   enough   to   do  what  I  wanted 

to,  provided  I  wanted  something  modest.  I  had  a 

187 


THE    TORTOISE 

great  notion,  when  I  came  out  of  Gottingen,  of  a 
wanderjahr.  Only  I  was  determined  it  shouldn't 
be  hackneyed.  There  was  a  good  deal  of  Wilhelm 
Meister  in  it,  all  the  same,  with  a  strong  dash 
of  Heine.  I  fancied  myself,  rather,  at  that  time; 
wanted  to  be  different — like  every  other  young  pil 
grim.  I  didn't  want  the  common  fate — not  I.  I 
hadn't  any  grievance  against  the  world,  because  I 
had  a  complete  faith  in  the  world's  giving  me  what 
I  wanted,  in  the  end.  But  I  distinctly  remember 
promising  myself  to  be  remarkable.  I  shan't,  of 
course,  unless  there  is  something  in  spectrum  anal 
ysis.  I  used  to  quote  Heine  to  myself: 

'Du  stolzes  Herz,  du  hast  es  ja  gewollt! 
Du  wolltest  gliicklich  sein,  unendlich  gllicklich, 
Oder  unendlich  elend,  stolzes  Herz, 
Und  jetzo  bist  du  elend.' 

Of  course,  I  never  believed  that  I  should  be  *  unend 
lich  elend,'  but  I  should  have  preferred  that  to  any 
thing  mediocre.  At  that  age — you  know  what  we're 
like.  The  man  who  would  look  at  the  stars  by  day 
light  and  tumbled  into  the  well.  That's  us,  to  the  life. 
"I  met  her  in  a  villa  above  Ravello.  Some  charming 
188 


THE    TORTOISE 

French  people — or,  at  least,  Monsieur  was  French, 
though  Madame  and  the  money  were  American — 
were  keeping  guard  over  her.  The  American  wife 
had  known  her  somewhere,  and  was  being  good  to 
her  in  her  great  misfortune.  I  won't  go  into  explana 
tions  of  how  I  came  to  frequent  their  villa.  They 
were  among  the  scores  of  people  I  had  met  and 
known  in  this  or  that  pleasant,  casual  way.  I  used 
to  go  up  and  dine  with  them;  I  prolonged  the 
Italian  interlude  in  my  wanderjahr,  more  or  less 
for  the  sake  of  doing  so.  I  had  notions  of  going  on 
to  Egypt,  but  there  was  time  enough  for  that.  I 
stayed  on  even  more  because  I  liked  the  villa — an 
old  Saracen  stronghold  on  the  edge  of  the  Mediter 
ranean,  modernized  into  comfort — than  because  I 
liked  them,  though  they  were  pleasant  enough. 

"At  first  I  wished  the  girl  were  not  there.  She 
never  talked;  she  was  just  a  stiff  figure,  swathed 
in  black  up  to  her  throat,  sitting  day  by  day  almost 
motionless  on  a  parapet.  She  was  a  harsh  note. 
Wherever  you  were,  she  was  in  the  middle  distance, 
a  black  figure  looking  out  to  sea.  It  didn't  take 
many  days  for  her  to  get  on  my  nerves.  She  was  like 
189 


THE    TORTOISE 

a  portent.  I  fancy  she  got  on  theirs,  too,  but  they 
were  helpless.  I  gathered  that  Madame  C.  had  a 
good  deal  of  talk  with  her  daily,  in  hours  when  they 
were  alone;  and  before  very  long  she  permitted  me 
to  share  her  perplexities.  She  didn't  want  to  desert 
her  young  friend;  but  the  girl  seemed  to  have  sunk 
into  a  kind  of  apathy.  She  thought,  perhaps,  a  spe 
cialist  ought  to  see  her.  A  very  American  touch, 
that!  Unluckily,  the  girl  had  no  close  kin;  there 
was  no  one  to  turn  her  over  to  officially. 

"Before  long,  I  knew  the  whole  story.  The  young 
lady's  fiance  was  a  civil  engineer,  and  had  been  em 
ployed  by  Portuguese  interests  in  East  Africa.  He 
had  gone  into  the  interior — more  or  less — on  a  job  for 
the  Nyassa  Company:  headquarters,  Mozambique. 
There  was  supposed  to  be  money  in  it,  because  the 
Portuguese  had  been  growing  ashamed  of  their  co 
lonial  reputation,  and  had  been  bucking  up  to  some 
extent.  Hence  the  job  with  the  Nyassa  Company. 
She  had  wanted  to  go  out  with  him,  but  he  would 
not  permit  it.  Quite  right,  too.  Mozambique's  no 
place  for  a  woman — or  Lourengo  Marques,  either.  / 
know.  Damn  their  yellow,  half-breed  souls!  .  .  . 
190 


THE    TORTOISE 

She  had  been  waiting  for  him  to  finish  his  job  in 
the  interior,  and  come  home  to  marry  her.  The 
date  of  their  marriage,  I  imagine,  had  not  been  very 
far  off. 

"  Suddenly,  letters  had  ceased  to  come.  There  had 
been  a  horrid  interval  of  months  when  there  was  no 
word  out  of  Africa  for  her.  Cablegrams  were  un 
answered.  The  people  at  the  other  end  must  have 
been  very  unbusinesslike  not  to  give  her  some  inkling 
of  the  reason  why  they  couldn't  deliver  them.  I  sup 
pose  it  was  the  uncertainty.  There  he  was,  up  on  the 
verge  of  Rhodesia  or  beyond,  prospecting,  surveying, 
exploring:  it  was  quite  on  the  cards  that  he  should 
lose  his  way,  or  be  infinitely  delayed,  or  fail  somehow 
of  his  communications  with  headquarters  on  the 
coast.  Beastly  months  for  her,  anyhow!  Then  let 
ters  did  come.  I  never  saw  any  of  them,  but  I  can 
imagine  just  the  awkward  vocabulary  of  them:  a 
Portuguese  head  clerk  in  Mozambique  trying  to 
break  it  to  her  ornately  that  her  man  had  died  of 
fever  up-country.  Can't  you  imagine  those  letters 
— in  quaint,  bad  English,  on  thin  paper,  worn  to 
utter  limpness  and  poverty  with  being  clutched 
191 


THE    TORTOISE 

and  carried  and  cried  over?  I  never  saw  them,  but 
lean. 

"Well — I  don't  need  to  go  into  it  all.  Indeed,  there 
were  many  details  that  Madame  C.  had  forgotten, 
and  that  she  naturally  couldn't  ask  the  girl  to  re 
fresh  her  memory  of  for  my  benefit.  What  was 
troubling  Madame  was  the  girl's  condition.  Ap 
parently,  she  had  loved  the  man  consumingly,  and 
considered  herself  virtually  dead — entirely  negligible 
at  least,  as  pitiful  and  worthless  a  thing  as  a  child- 
widow  in  India.  But  you've  noticed,  perhaps,  that 
the  very  humble  are  sometimes  positively  overween 
ing  about  some  special  thing.  The  damned  worms 
won't  turn — any  more  than  if  they  were  elephants  in 
the  path!  And  so  it  was  with  her. 

"  She  was  determined  to  go  out  and  fetch  his  body 
home.  The  people  in  Mozambique  had  to  confess 
that  they  didn't  know  where  those  sacred  remains 
were.  The  epidemic  had  run  through  the  little  camp, 
and,  by  the  time  the  man  himself  had  keeled  over, 
the  few  natives  that  were  left  hadn't  nerve  enough  to 
do  anything  for  him.  They  remembered  him,  raving 
with  fever  and  dropping  among  the  corpses.  A  few, 
192 


THE    TORTOISE 

who  were  not  already  stricken,  got  away — probably 
considering  that  there  was  a  lively  curse  on  his 
immediate  neighborhood.  There  had  been  complete 
demoralization.  A  few  of  them  had  eventually 
strayed  back,  as  I  said,  joining  any  one  who  would 
take  them  home.  Their  casual  employments  delayed 
them  a  good  deal,  and  by  the  time  they  turned  in  a 
report — to  use  formal  language  in  a  case  where  it 
is  a  sore  misfit — there  was  nothing  to  be  done.  I 
didn't  get  this  from  Madame  C.;  I  got  it  from  her, 
later,  when  she  told  me  everything  she  knew  about 
it.  But  I  put  it  in  here,  which  is,  after  all,  where 
it  belongs." 

Chalmers  stopped — he  had  been  talking  steadily 
— and  lighted  a  cigarette.  I  took  the  opportunity  to 
sip  a  little  whiskey.  Through  his  introduction,  I  had 
been  staring  at  him  fixedly.  My  own  cigarette  had 
burned  to  ashes  in  my  fingers;  when  I  felt  the  spark 
touch  them,  I  dropped  the  thing,  still  without  look 
ing  at  it,  into  the  tray.  He  hunched  his  shoulders  in 
the  speckled  brown  coat  and  bent  forward,  his  arms 
folded  on  the  table.  The  little  movement  of  his  head 
from  side  to  side  was  very  like  a  tortoise. 
193 


THE    TORTOISE 

"Well,  you  see  ...  of  course  she  couldn't  go 
alone,  and  of  course  there  was  no  one  to  see  her 
through  a  thing  like  that.  I  am  sure  she  hadn't  money 
enough  to  pay  any  one  for  going  with  her.  If  she  had 
tried  to  go,  she  wouldn't  have  succeeded  in  doing 
much  except  get  into  the  newspapers.  She  had  sense 
enough  to  realize  it,  or  the  C.'s  had  sense  enough  to 
make  her.  But  if  she  couldn't  do  that,  she  wouldn't 
do  anything  else.  She  simply  sat  and  brooded,  look 
ing  seaward.  She  apparently  intended,  at  least,  not  to 
let  go  of  her  idea.  She  may  have  had  some  notion  of 
mesmerizing  the  universe  with  her  obsession — just 
by  sitting  tight  and  never,  for  a  moment,  thinking  of 
anything  else.  There  she  sat,  anyhow,  and  Ma 
dame  C.  sent  out  her  doves  in  vain.  They  all  came 
back  from  the  parapet,  drenched  with  Mediterra 
nean  spray.  So  it  went  on.  The  girl  might  have  been 
watching  for  some  fabulous  creature  to  rise  up  from 
the  waves  and  take  her  to  her  goal.  She  would  cheer 
fully  have  embarked  for  East  Africa  on  a  dolphin,  I 
think.  At  all  events,  she  wouldn't  leave  her  parapet, 
she  wouldn't  leave  the  villa,  she  wouldn't  descend 
to  the  conventional  plane.  I  don't  mean  that  she 
194 


THE    TORTOISE 

didn't  talk  like  a  sane  woman;  I  mean  only  that  she 
sat  at  the  heart  of  her  obsession,  and  that  when  you 
came  within  a  few  feet  of  her  you  knocked  up  against 
it,  almost  tangibly.  A  queer  thing  to  meet,  day  after 
day.  ...  It  ended  by  my  being  distinctly  im 
pressed. 

"Very  like  the  girl  in  the  play!  Just  the  same 
blonde  vagueness,  just  the  same  effect  of  being  cast 
inevitably  for  an  unimportant,  a  merely  supplemen 
tary  part.  But  one  is  never  fooled  twice  by  that  sort 
of  thing.  I  tell  you  Maude  Lansing  will  find  herself 
some  day  doing  chambermaid  to  that  girl's  hero 
ine!  If  I  was  impressed,  it  was  by  the  cul-de-sac 
she  had  got  herself  into.  She  couldn't  go  forward, 
and  she  wouldn't  go  back.  She  sat  there,  waiting  for 
the  world  to  change.  In  the  end — after  Madame  C. 
had  wrung  her  hands  for  your  benefit  a  few  hundred 
times — you  began  to  damn  the  world  for  not  chang 
ing.  It  seemed  to  be  up  to  the  perverse  elements  to 
stop  the  regular  business  of  the  cosmos  and  waft  her 
to  her  goal. 

"I  could  hardly  have  talked  to  her  about  any 
thing  but  her  plight.  It  was  a  week  or  two  before  I 
195 


THE   TORTOISE 

talked  to  her  at  all;  but,  in  the  end,  I  found  that  if  I 
wanted  to  continue  to  come  to  the  villa,  I  should  have 
to  brave  that  presence  on  the  parapet — domesticate 
myself  in  that  pervasive  and  most  logical  gloom.  So 
I  did.  She  was  a  positive  creature;  there  wasn't  the 
faintest  hint  of  apology  or  deprecation  in  her  man 
ner.  She  would  see  you  on  business,  and  only  on 
business — the  business  being  her  tragedy.  Don't  mis 
understand — "  (Chalmers  frowned  a  little  as  he 
looked  at  me.)  "She  was  neither  lachrymose  nor 
hard;  she  was  just  infinitely  and  quite  decently  pre 
occupied  with  her  one  desire  and  her  helplessness  to 
achieve  it.  She  didn't  magnify  herself.  It  isn't  mag 
nifying  yourself  to  want  a  proper  funeral  for  the  per 
son  you  love,  is  it?  She  was  even  grateful  for  sym 
pathy,  though  she  didn't  want  a  stream  of  words 
poured  out  over  her.  She — she  was  an  awfully  good 
sort." 

Chalmers  dug  his  cigarette-end  almost  viciously 
into  the  tray,  and  watched  the  smoke  go  out.  We 
both  watched  the  smoke  go  out.  .  .  . 

"Before  long,  we  had  talked  together  a  good  deal, 
especially  during  the  hour  before  dinner,  when  the 
196 


THE    TORTOISE 

sun  and  the  sea  were  so  miraculous  that  any  other 
miracle  seemed  possible.  Such  easy  waters  to  cross, 
they  looked,  in  the  sunset  light!  You  forgot  the 
blistering  leagues  beyond;  you  forgot  that  it  took 
money  and  men  and  courage  and  endurance,  and  all 
kinds  of  things  that  are  hard  to  come  by,  to  get  to 
the  goal  she  was  straining  for.  I  suppose  it  wouldn't 
be  honest  to  say  that  she  ever  passed  her  personal 
fervor  on  to  me — I  couldn't,  in  the  nature  of  things, 
care  so  much  about  recovering  that  poor  chap's 
bones  as  she  did — but  I  did  end  by  wishing  with  all 
my  heart  that  I  could  help.  Little  by  little  it  seemed 
a  romantic  thing  to  do — to  go  out  searching  for  the 
spot  where  he  had  died.  Of  course,  getting  the  bones 
themselves,  except  for  extraordinary  luck,  was  all 
moonshine;  but  she  didn't  see  that,  and  her  blind 
ness  affected  me.  Finally,  my  wanderjahr  began  to 
shape  itself  to  new  horizons.  Why  shouldn't  I  have 
a  try?  ...  I  dare  say  I  posed  a  little  as  a  paladin, 
though  not,  I  hope,  to  her.  Anyhow,  I  decided  to 
broach  it. 

"I  don't  suppose  you  can  understand  it — any  of 
it — for  the  simple  reason  that  I  can't  describe  her. 
197 


THE    TORTOISE 

She  was  the  kind  of  person  who  sees  very  clearly  the 
difference  between  the  possible  and  the  impossible; 
who  never  attempts  anything  but  the  possible;  yet 
who  sets  every  one  about  her  itching  to  attain  the 
impossible.  Not  'for  her  sake/  in  the  conventional 
sense;  no,  not  that  at  all.  Simply,  she  set  before  you 
so  clearly  the  reason  why  a  thing  couldn't  be  done 
that  you  longed  to  confute  her,  just  as  you  sometimes 
long  to  confute  fate.  She  was  as  convincing  and  as 
maddening  as  a  natural  law.  Each  of  us,  sooner  or 
later,  has  tried  to  get  the  better  of  some  little  habit 
of  the  universe.  You  felt  like  saying:  'Stop  looking 
like  that;  I'll  do  it— see  if  I  don't/ 

"That  was  the  spirit  in  which  I  went  to  her,  late 
one  afternoon,  on  her  parapet.  The  C.'s  had  been 
away  all  day  and  were  not  to  return  until  evening. 
Madame  C.  had  exasperated  me  the  night  before  by 
proposing,  quite  baldly  and  kindly,  that  the  girl  be 
decoyed  into  a  sanatorium.  The  C.'s  couldn't  keep 
her  much  longer — they  were  off  for  Biskra — and  it 
was  up  to  me.  I  had  lain  awake  half  the  night,  ex 
ploring  the  last  recesses  of  disaster  into  which  my 
idea  might  lead  me;  I  had  sailed  far  out  on  the  bright 
198 


THE    TORTOISE 

waters  all  day,  perfecting  my  courage.  I  could  have 
written  as  bitter  a  little  allegory  about  it  all  as  Heine 
himself.  Secretly,  in  a  tawdry  corner  of  my  mind,  I 
thought  Wilhelm  Meister  was  a  poor  stick  compared 
with  me.  But  it  was  honest  romance;  I  was  willing  to 
pay." 

I  finished  my  whiskey  as  Chalmers's  voice  dropped 
and  died  down,  and  he  busied  himself  a  little  ner 
vously  with  lighting  a  pipe.  His  green  eyes  had  flecks 
of  brown  in  them.  Once  more,  in  the  speckled  brown 
figure  opposite  me,  I  saw  the  tortoise  beyond  the 
reach  of  biology,  which  upholds  the  world,  which 
carries  the  burden  of  all  human  flesh  and  spirit. 

"I  told  her  that  I  was  ready  to  go;  that  I  could 
scrape  together  enough  money  for  the  expedition 
without  entirely  impoverishing  myself.  My  figures 
hadn't  been  quite  so  reassuring  as  that  when  I  totted 
them  up  on  a  piece  of  hotel  paper  at  dawn,  but  at 
least  I  had  left  magnificent  margins  for  everything. 

"She  smiled — I  had  never  seen  her  smile  before, 
and  at  the  moment  it  made  her  thanks  seem  pro 
fuse — but  she  shook  her  head.  She  was  beautifully 
simple  about  it.  I  liked  her  for  that. 
199 


THE    TORTOISE 

"'It  wouldn't  do.  Not  that  it  isn't  divinely  good  of 
you !  But,  you  see,  the  point  is  that — '  she  stopped. 

"'Well?'  My  heart  was  beating  hard.  I  had  be 
come  enamored  of  my  idea.  I  no  more  wanted  to  be 
baulked  than  she  did. 

"'The  point  has  always  been  that  I  should  go 
myself.' 

"'Then  go  yourself!' 

'"Carrying  off  all  your  money?  I  can't — Don 
Quixote.'  There  was  nothing  playful  in  her  tone;  and 
she  had  me  all  the  more  because  there  wasn't.  She 
was  merely  registering  facts.  Even  the  'Don  Quix 
ote'  was,  to  her  mind,  a  fact  that  she  was  registering. 
She  was  splendidly  literal. 

" '  Come  with  me.  I  don't  propose  that  you  should 
go  alone.' 

"She  frowned  a  little;  and  in  that  frown  I  read  all 
the  weariness  of  the  hours  of  past  talk  with  Ma 
dame  C.  Presently  she  looked  up  at  me,  very  kindly, 
a  little  questioningly,  as  if  for  the  first  time  my  per 
sonality  in  itself  interested  her. 

'"You  know  that — even  for  me — that  is  impos 
sible.' 

200 


THE    TORTOISE 

"  I  knew  what  she  meant :  that  she  would  have  been 
ready  for  any  abnegation,  being,  herself,  as  I  have 
said,  negligible;  but  that  the  world  must  be  able  to 
pick  no  flaw  in  the  rites  paid  to  the  shade. 

'"If  you  will  marry  me,  it  is  not  impossible.' 

"That  is  what  I  said — just  like  that.  I  had  deter 
mined  that  nothing  should  be  an  obstacle.  She  didn't 
change  her  posture  or  her  expression  by  the  fraction 
of  a  millimetre.  She  looked  silently  past  me  at  the 
ilexes  as  if  she  had  not  heard.  But  she  had  heard.  I 
think  that  at  that  moment — no,  I  don't  except  all 
that  came  after — I  touched  the  highest  point  of  my 
romance.  .  .  .  She  thought  for  a  moment  or  two 
while  I  waited.  I  suppose  she  was  considering  what 
the  world  would  say  to  that,  and  deciding  that  the 
world  would  have  no  right  to  say  anything;  that  it 
would  be,  and  legitimately  so,  between  her  and  me. 
The  dead  themselves,  of  course,  can  be  trusted  to 
understand.  It  didn't  take  her  long — you  see  she 
was  a  girl  of  one  idea,  and  of  one  idea  only. 

'"Very  well,  I  will  marry  you.'  The  words  came  as 
simply  from  her  lips  as  any  others.  We  didn't  at  that 
time,  or  at  any  time  before  our  marriage,  have  any 
201 


THE    TORTOISE 

discussion  of  the  extremely — shall  I  say? — individual 
nature  of  our  relation.  That  was  the  one  thing  we 
couldn't  have  talked  of.  It  would  have  been — you 
see? — quite  impossible  for  either  to  imply,  by  ap 
proaching  the  subject,  that  the  other  perhaps  didn't 
understand.  I  couldn't  even  be  so  crass  as  to  say: 
*  Look  here,  my  dear  girl,  of  course  I  quite  recognize 
that  you  don't  in  any  sense  belong  to  me ' ;  or  she  be 
so  crass  as  to  say  in  turn:  'I  know  it.'  No:  I  sup 
pose  I  have  never  been  so  near  the  summit  as  I  was 
that  evening  after  she  had  '  accepted '  me,  and  we  had 
both  silently  laid  our  freedom  on  the  altar  of  that  dead 
man.  Neither  of  us  realized  all  the  inevitable  practi 
cal  results  of  such  a  compact.  We  simply  thought  we 
had  thrown  the  ultimate  sufficing  sop  to  Cerberus, 
and  that  all  our  lives  we  should  hear  him  contentedly 
crunching  it.  I  am  quite  sure  that  her  mind  turned 
as  blank  a  face  to  the  future  as  mine.  Quite." 

His  voice  rang  authoritatively  across  the  table.  I 
said  nothing.  What  could  I  say?  What  is  the  proper 
greeting  when  you  cross  the  threshold  of  such  a 
habitation?  I  offered  him  a  silence  that  was  at  least 
respectful. 

202 


THE    TORTOISE 

"Well,  I  won't  bore  you  with  too  many  details. 
She  pulled  herself  together  and  said  her  visit  must 
end.  We  did  not  tell  the  C.'s.  We  merely  let  them  get 
off  to  Tunis.  It  would  not  have  been  easy  for  her 
to  explain  to  Madame  C.  all  the  things  that  we  had 
never  condescended  to  explain  to  each  other.  She  was 
a  Catholic,  by  the  way.  We  were  married  by  a  parish 
priest  in — no,  on  second  thoughts,  I  won't  even  tell 
you  where.  The  place  has  kept  the  secret  hitherto. 
It  is  better  so.  I  left  her  at  once  to  make  arrangements 
for  the  quest.  It  took  some  time  and  a  good  deal  of 
frenzied  journeying  to  realize  on  my  securities.  I  gave 
her  a  letter  of  credit,  so  that  she  could  be  in  all  in 
cidental  ways  independent  of  me.  That  was  necessa 
ry,  because  I  was  to  go  out  to  Mozambique  first,  and 
she  was  to  follow  only  when  I  sent  for  her.  Very  soon, 
you  see,  I  began  to  realize  the  practical  inconve 
niences  of  travelling  with  a  woman  who  bears  your 
name  and  who  is  a  total  stranger  to  you.  It's 
damned  expensive,  for  one  thing."  Chalmers's  smile 
was  nearer  the  authentic  gleam  of  irony  than  any 
thing  I  had  seen  before  during  the  evening. 

"Well,  I  went.  I  interviewed  the  proper  people;  I 
203 


THE    TORTOISE 

saw  one  of  the  creatures  who  knew  the  spot  where 
our  man  had  died.  Eventually  I  arranged  the  expedi 
tion.  Then  I  cabled  for  her.  She  took  the  Dunvegan 
Castle  at  Naples.  By  the  time  I  met  her  at  the 
steamer,  she  had  grown  incredible  to  me.  I  could 
more  easily  have  believed  her  a  sharer  in  some  half- 
forgotten  light  adventure  than  my  duly  registered 
wife.  She  was  unreal  to  me,  a  figure  recurring  inex 
plicably  in  a  dream,  a  memory — of  exactly  what  sort 
I  was  not  quite  sure.  My  feet  lagged  along  the  pier. 
.  .  .  She  soon  set  all  that  straight.  I  had  wondered 
if  the  sop  to  Cerberus  would  require  our  seeming  to 
kiss.  She  managed  it  somehow  so  that  no  stage  kiss 
was  necessary.  She  dissipated  the  funk  into  which  I 
had  fallen,  by  practical  questions  and  preoccupa 
tions  ;  she  came  upon  my  fever  like  a  cool  breeze  off 
the  sea.  She  had  made  her  point;  she  had  achieved 
her  miracle;  and  in  every  incidental  way,  little  and 
big,  she  could  afford  to  show  what  a  serviceable  soul 
she  was.  She  was  a  good  thing  to  have  about.  There 
were  times  when  the  situation  got  on  my  nerves,  in 
Mozambique,  before  we  started.  It's  such  a  small 
hole  that  we  seemed  always  to  be  bumping  into  each 
204 


THE    TORTOISE 

other.  I  couldn't  make  out  her  private  attitude  to 
wards  me;  I  used  to  wonder  if  she  had  any,  or  if  she 
simply  thought  of  me  as  a  courier  in  her  own  class.  I 
was  so  endlessly  occupied  with  engaging  men  and 
beasts  and  camping  kit  and  supplies — what  was  I 
but  a  courier?  The  paladin  idea  was  fading  a  little; 
though  now  and  then,  at  night,  I'd  look  up  at  the 
Southern  Cross  and  let  the  strangeness  of  the  thing 
convince  me  all  over  again.  I  don't  think  I  wanted 
anything  so  commonplace  as  gratitude  from  her;  but 
I  did  want  in  her  some  sense  of  the  strangeness  of  our 
alliance,  with  all  the  things  it  left  unsaid.  Perhaps  I 
wanted  her  to  realize  that  not  every  man  would  have 
responded  so  quickly  to  the  call  of  impersonal  ro 
mance.  I  can  look  back  on  all  that  egotism  of  youth 
and  despise  it;  but  there's  something  not  wholly  ig 
noble  in  an  egotism  that  wants  only  good  fame  with 
one's  self  and  one's  secret  collaborator.  Anyhow, 
there  were  moments  when  my  dedication  seemed 
solemn;  just  as  there  were  other  moments  when  I 
seemed  like  an  inadequate  tenor  in  a  comic  opera. 
I  never  knew  just  how  she  hovered  between  those 
two  conceptions.  We  were  destined  to  see  each  other 
205 


THE    TORTOISE 

only  by  lightning-flashes — never  once  in  the  clear 
light  of  day. 

"I  can't  tell  you  how  I  came  to  hate  the  Portu 
guese  before  we  left  that  mean  little  hole.  You 
laughed  at  me  once  for  rending  Blakely  to  shreds 
over  Camoens.  I've  read  Camoens  in  my  day  and 
hated  him,  as  if  something  in  me  had  known  before 
hand  that  I  was  eventually  to  have  good  reason  to 
loathe  every  syllable  of  that  damned  language.  My 
stock  is  Southern,  too — South  Carolina — and  you  can 
imagine  how  I  enjoyed  seeing,  at  every  turn,  the  nig 
ger  the  better  man.  Portugal  ought  to  be  wiped  off 
the  map  of  Africa. 

"Well — I  got  our  arrangements  made  as  well  as  I 
could.  It  was  lucky  I  had  left  handsome  margins  for 
everything,  because  the  graft  was  sickening.  They 
wouldn't  let  your  own  approved  consignments  leave 
the  dock  without  your  handing  out  cash  to  at  least 
three  yellow  dogs  that  called  themselves  officials.  I 
had  hoped  to  find  some  sort  of  female  servant  for 
her — I  shook  at  the  thought  of  having  her  go  off  on 
a  trip  like  that  without  another  woman  to  do  things 
for  her  that  I,  in  the  circumstances,  couldn't  very 
206 


THE    TORTOISE 

well  do.  But  there  wasn't  a  wench  of  either  color  or 
any  of  the  intervening  shades  that  a  nice  woman 
could  have  had  about  her.  She  was  very  plucky 
about  it  all.  As  I  say,  she  had  made  her  great  point, 
and  didn't  care.  The  morning  we  started,  she  stuck 
a  gentian  in  my  buttonhole  and  another  in  hers — 
and  she  smiled.  A  smile  of  hers  carried  very  far.  And 
so  we  started. 

"I  needn't  give  you  the  details  of  our  trip.  People 
write  books  about  that  sort  of  thing;  keep  diaries  of 
their  mishaps,  and  how  Umgalooloo  or  Ishbosheth 
or  some  other  valuable  assistant  stole  a  bandanna 
handkerchief  and  had  to  be  mulcted  of  a  day's  pay 
— all  very  interesting  to  somebody,  no  doubt.  To 
tell  the  truth,  the  concrete  details  maddened  me;  and 
we  seemed  to  live  wholly  in  concrete  terms  of  the 
smallest.  I,  who  had  planned  for  my  wanderjahr  a 
colossal,  an  almost  forbidden  intimacy  with  Pla 
tonic  abstractions !  I  had  always  rather  meant  to  go 
in  for  biology  eventually,  but  I  got  over  that  in 
Africa;  we  were  much  too  near  the  lower  forms  of 
life.  And  to  this  day,  as  you  well  know,  I  can't 
bear  hearing  Harry  Dawes  talk  about  folk-lore. 
207 


THE    TORTOISE 

He's  driven  me  home  from  the  club  a  good  many 
nights." 

I  caught  my  breath.  It  was  almost  uncanny,  the 
way  Chalmers's  little  idiosyncrasies  were  explaining 
themselves,  bit  by  bit.  I  felt  the  cold  wind  of  a  deter 
ministic  law  blowing  over  my  shoulder — as  cold  as 
Calvinism.  I  had  always  loved  temperament  and 
its  vagaries.  Now  I  wasn't  sure  I  wanted  the 
light  in  Chalmers's  eyes  explained,  to  the  last  gleam. 
Mightn't  any  of  us  ever  be  inexplicable  and  ir 
responsible  and  delightful? 

"Of  course  they  had  given  us  maps  in  Mozam 
bique — not  official  ones,  oh,  no!  Those  would  have 
come  too  high.  The  Nyassa  Company  had  to  pretend 
to  be  amiable,  but  they  didn't  fork  out  anything 
they  didn't  have  to.  Small  loss  the  official  maps  were, 
I  fancy;  but  those  we  had  weren't  much  good.  It 
wasn't,  however,  a  difficult  journey  to  make,  from 
that  point  of  view,  and  the  cheerful  savage  who  had 
abandoned  our  hero  swore  he  knew  where  to  take  us. 
In  eight  weeks,  we  reached  the  spot  that  he  declared 
to  be  the  scene  of  the  death  from  fever.  I  dare  say 
he  was  right;  he  knew  the  villages  along  the  way;  he 
208 


THE    TORTOISE 

had  described  the  topography,  more  or  less,  before 
we  started,  and  it  tallied.  We  pitched  camp  and 
spent  three  horrible  days  there.  It  is  needless  to  say 
that  we  might  as  well  have  hunted  for  the  poor  fel 
low's  bones  under  the  parapet  at  Ravello.  I  saw — 
and  if  you'll  believe  me,  I  positively  hadn't  seen 
before — what  moonshine  it  all  was.  She  ought  to 
have  been  put  to  bed  and  made  to  pray  God  to  make 
her  a  good  girl,  before  she  dragged  anybody — even 
me — out  on  such  a  wild-goose  chase  as  that.  There 
wasn't  a  relic — except  certain  signs  of  some  one's 
having  cleared  ground  there  before,  and  one  or  two 
indescribable  fragments,  picked  up  within  a  five- 
hundred-yard  radius,  that  might  have  been  parts  of 
tin  cans.  Why  should  there  have  been?  If  there  had 
been  any  plunder,  natives  would  have  found  and 
taken  it,  as  they  would  inevitably  have  removed  and 
destroyed  any  corporal  vestiges  out  of  sheer  super 
stition  and  hostility.  I  had  learned  their  little  ways, 
since  Ravello.  The  rank  soil  in  the  wet  season  would 
have  done  the  rest.  I  wondered — cruelly,  no  doubt — 
whether  she  had  expected  him  to  bury  himself  with 
a  cairn  atop  and  a  few  note-books  (locked  up  in  a 
209 


THE   TORTOISE 

despatch-box)  decorously  waiting  for  her  in  his  grave. 
On  the  strength  of  the  savage's  positive  declaration 
that  at  such  a  distance — two  days — from  the  last 
village,  beyond  such  a  stream,  beneath  such  and  such 
a  clump  of  trees,  he  had  seen  the  white  man  fall  in 
the  last  delirium,  she  searched  the  place,  as  you  might 
say,  with  a  microscope.  I  thought  it  extremely  likely 
that  the  fellow  was  lying  for  the  sake  of  our  pay,  but 
I  had  to  admit  that  I  couldn't  prove  it.  Certainly, 
his  information  was  the  only  thing  we  could  reason 
ably  go  on;  we  couldn't  invest  all  Portuguese  East 
Africa  with  an  army  and  set  them  to  digging  up  every 
square  inch  of  soil  in  that  God-forsaken  country.  If 
this  clue  failed,  we  could  only  return.  But  there  was 
a  moment  when,  in  her  baffled  anguish,  I  think  she 
could  have  taken  a  good  close-range  shot  at  the  in 
scrutable  nigger  who  had  been  with  him,  and  had 
left  him,  and  could  not  even  bring  us  to  his  body. 
The  girl  on  the  stage  to-night  was  like  that,  though 
you  don't  believe  it.  Vague,  indeed!  Maude  Lan 
sing's  a  fool  if  she  keeps  her  on. 

"You  see" — Chalmers  shifted  his  position  and, 
ever  so  little,  his  tone  of  voice.  It  was  extraordinary 
210 


THE    TORTOISE 

how  straight  he  went  with  his  story,  considering  that 
he  had  never  told  it  before.  He  seemed  to  have 
dragged  it  out  from  some  receptacle,  intact,  not  a 
thread  frayed,  in  perfect  order,  ready  to  spread  be 
fore  me.  The  pattern  was  as  clear  as  if  it  were  just  off 
the  torturesome  loom.  He  seemed  to  know  it  by  heart. 
"You  see" — he  went  on — "she  had  been  chang 
ing  steadily,  all  through  that  march  of  ours.  You 
would  have  said  that  the  tropical  sun  had  forced  her 
growth.  She  had  been  a  cold,  immature  thing  in 
Italy — passions  dormant  and  sealed.  Now  they  had 
worked  their  way  up  to  the  surface  and  were  just 
beneath  the  skin.  She  would  have  shot  the  nigger. 
Before,  I  suppose,  she  had  lived  with  ideas  only; 
even  he  must  have  been  chiefly  an  idea,  though  a  tre 
mendous  one.  The  daily  contact  with  all  sorts  of  un 
suspected  facts,  the  hopeless  crudeness  of  the  hinter 
lands  most  of  us  never  get  into,  had  worked  on  her. 
There  may  be  something  subtle  in  the  tropics — peo 
ple  talk  as  if  there  were.  I  should  say  they  were  no 
more  subtle  than  the  slums.  The  body  demands  a 
hundred  things,  and  it  becomes  a  matter  of  the 
utmost  moment  whether  you  get  them  for  it  or  not. 
211 


THE    TORTOISE 

You  can't  achieve  subtlety  until  the  body  is  lulled. 
That  life  has  complications  of  its  own;  but  I  shouldn't 
call  it  subtle.  Very  far  from  it.  And  savages  make 
you  feel  that  it's  subtlety  enough  merely  to  have  a 
white  skin;  there's  something  irrelevant  and  ignoble 
in  pushing  subtlety  further.  In  the  end  the  sun  wears 
you  out,  I  suppose,  and  makes  you  want  nothing 
very  much;  but  at  first  it  merely  makes  it  intoler 
able  not  to  have  everything  on  the  very  instant.  .  .  . 
I  merely  meant  to  explain  that  she  was  a  changed 
creature — a  good  sport  always,  but  inclined  to  im 
patiences,  angers,  delights,  and  fervors  that  I  fancy 
she  had  never  felt  before.  Her  tongue  was  loosed; 
she  was  lyric  about  cool  water,  violent  about  native 
trickeries.  I  don't  mean — Heaven  forbid! — that  she 
was  vulgar.  She  had  a  sweet  distinction  all  her  own. 
She  was  merely  real  and  varied  and  vital.  And  I 
dare  say  the  fundamental  formality  of  our  relation 
was  all  the  subtlety  we  could  stand.  It  put  an  edge 
on  everything. 

"We  were  very  near  the  line  of  Rhodesia,  and  for 
various  reasons  we  decided  to  cross  over  and  come 
down  far  enough  south  through  British  territory  to 


THE    TORTOISE 

strike  the  Zambesi  and  its  boats.  If  there  was  any  in 
formation  to  be  picked  up,  we  should  be  more  likely 
to  find  it  in  that  direction  than  by  going  back  the 
way  we  had  come,  which  was  utterly  barren  of  clues. 
I  had  reason  to  suppose  that  the  others  who  had  sur 
vived  the  fever  had  gone  on  to  the  Rhodesian  vil 
lages.  We  started  in  the  cool  of  dawn,  and  I  ought 
to  say  that  there  were  no  backward  glances  on  her 
part.  She  was  convinced  that  there  was  nothing  in 
that  precise  spot  for  her;  and  I  think  she  had  hope 
of  finding  something  in  the  miles  just  beyond.  I  could 
see  that  she  did  not  more  than  half  believe  the  iden 
tifications  of  the  negro  who  had  been  on  the  earlier 
expedition.  True,  his  guttural  gibberish  did  not 
sound  like  information;  but,  after  all,  he  was  the. 
only  link  we  had  with  that  supreme  and  sordid  ad 
venture.  We  pushed  on." 

Chalmers  threw  back  his  head  and  stretched  his 
arms,  but  went  on  presently  in  a  more  vibrant,  a 
more  intimately  reminiscent  tone.  The  club  was 
nearly  empty — it  was  getting  on  for  midnight.  I 
seemed  to  myself  to  be  quite  alone  with  the  tortoise 
that  upheld  the  world. 

213 


THE   TORTOISE 

"  I  suppose  this  is  the  point  in  the  narrative  to  say 
a  rather  difficult  thing — though  it  ought  to  be  clear 
that  I've  no  cause  or  wish  to  paint  myself  anything 
but  the  mottled  color  most  of  us  are.  I  spoke  of 
what  the  tropics  had  done  to  her:  fulfilled  her  in  all 
kinds  of  ways.  We  had  strange  talks  by  the  fire  at 
night,  moving  on,  after  the  necessary  practical  dis 
cussions,  into  regions  of  pure  emotion.  The  emotion 
was  all  over  the  incidents  we  encountered;  we  mar 
shalled  our  facts  and  made  our  decisions,  and  then 
leaned  back  and  generalized  with  passion.  Whatever 
Africa  had  done  to  her  inwardly,  it  had  at  least 
taught  her  to  talk.  I  had  never  had  any  particular 
sense  of  her  being  on  guard — there  was,  from  the  very 
first,  something  strange  and  delicate  in  the  flavor  of 
our  understanding — but  now  I  had  the  sense  of  her 
being  specifically  and  gloriously  off  her  guard.  We 
seemed  to  know  each  other  awfully  well."  Chalmers's 
face,  as  he  looked  down  at  his  pipe-bowl,  was  curi 
ously  boyish  for  an  instant.  He  might  have  been 
speaking  of  a  childhood  playmate. 

"  Put  it  that  I  fell  in  love  with  her.  I  don't  choose 
to  analyze  my  feeling  more  than  that.  There  was 
214 


THE    TORTOISE 

everything  in  it  to  make  me  the  prey  of  a  passion 
for  her — so  long  as  we  hadn't  begun,  in  Mozambique, 
by  hating  each  other.  She  was  straight,  she  was  fine, 
she  was  thoroughly  good;  she  was  also,  in  her  un 
failing  freshness  and  her  astonishing  health,  in 
finitely  desirable.  By  the  law  of  every  land  she  was 
my  wife.  There  wasn't  a  barrier  between  us  except 
the  frail  one  built  of  things  that  had  never  been 
said.  Of  course,  I  knew  that,  to  her,  the  barrier 
doubtless  looked  insuperable.  She  considered  herself 
the  inalienable  property  of  the  man  whose  bones  we 
were  fantastically  hunting  for.  Well:  can't  you  see 
that  that  very  fact  was  peculiarly  constructed  to 
whet  my  hunger?  It  was  maddening  to  know  that 
shadows  could  effectually  keep  two  strong,  sinewy 
creatures  apart.  Our  utter  isolation  in  our  adventure 
flung  us  upon  each  other. 

"'Doch  es  tritt  ein  styg'scher  Schatten 
Nachtlich  zwischen  mich  und  ihn.' 

"One  night  she  had  a  bad  dream;  she  moaned  and 
cried  out  in  her  sleep,  and  I  had  to  stand  outside  her 
tent  and  listen,  while  she  woke  and  wept  and  finally 
215 


THE    TORTOISE 

quieted  down  with  little  sobs  like  a  child's.  I  couldn't 
even  go  in  and  lay  my  hand  on  her  forehead  to  soothe 
her." 

He  shook  his  head,  and  over  his  face  crept  the 
shadow  of  the  burdened. 

"Well,  that  was  what  I  was  in  for,  and  I  knew  I 
was  in  for  it  as  long  as  I  should  desire  her.  Finally,  I 
only  prayed  that  we  might  get  safely  back  to  Mo 
zambique,  where  I  could  leave  her  forever.  I  knew 
that  before  my  fever  ebbed,  it  would  rise  in  a  horrid 
flood.  I  wanted  her  desperately;  I  should  want  her 
more  desperately  before  I  got  through  with  it;  and 
I  had,  for  my  honor's  sake,  not  to  let  her  know. 
It's  odd  how  many  situations  there  are  in  life 
that  make  it  an  insult  to  tell  a  woman  you  love  her. 
But  I  think  you'll  agree  with  me  that  this  is  rather 
an  extraordinary  case  of  it. 

"All  this  time,  I  hadn't  the  faintest  inkling  of  what 
she  felt :  whether  she  knew,  or  what  she  would  have 
thought  of  me  if  she  had  known.  There's  something 
tremendous  in  the  power  of  ideas.  Think  of  how  easy 
it  would  have  been  for  me — I  won't  say  to  take  what 
I  wanted,  though  against  that  background  it  wouldn't 
216 


THE    TORTOISE 

have  seemed  such  a  preposterous  thing  to  do — to 
insist  on  her  talking  it  out  with  me,  some  night  by 
the  fire;  how  little  she  could  have  turned  her  back  on 
me  if  I  had  wanted  to  ask  her  a  question.  But  I  was  as 
tongue-tied  as  if  we  had  been  in  a  drawing-room,  sur 
rounded  with  all  the  paraphernalia  of  chaperonage. 
And  yet  sometimes  it  didn't  seem  possible,  with  her 
face  and  her  speech  changing  like  that,  week  by  week, 
that  there  shouldn't  be  some  change  in  it  for  me. 

"I  often  wondered  if  she  ever  had  moments,  as  I 
did,  of  thinking  that  that  man  had  never  lived.  But  I 
could  only  go  on  assuming  that  she  gave  him  every 
thought  she  had.  I  never  knew,  by  the  way,  what  she 
felt — she  never  told  me.  I  said,  a  little  while  back, 
that  we  never  saw  each  other  in  the  clear  light  of 
day — only  in  lightning-flashes.  In  spite  of  our  sem 
blance  of  intimacy,  that  was  true.  For  when  a  man 
is  obsessed  with  the  notion  of  wanting  to  make  very 
definite  love  to  a  woman,  her  impersonal  conversa 
tion  is  a  kind  of  haze  at  best.  I  know  that  we  talked; 
but  I  know  that,  after  the  fiasco,  when  we  ate  our 
meals,  when  we  rode  side  by  side  along  those  un 
speakable  trails,  when  we  sat  by  the  fire  in  the  eve- 
217 


THE   TORTOISE 

ning,  I  hardly  knew  or  cared  what  we  talked  of.  I 
kept  a  kind  of  office  in  my  brain  quite  tidy  for  the 
transaction  of  business;  the  rest  was  "just  a  sort  of 
House  of  Usher  where  I  wandered,  wanting  her.  By 
the  time  we  struck  the  first  Rhodesian  village,  I 
didn't  even  feel  sure  I  could  hold  my  tongue  all  the 
way  south  and  east  again.  I  only  prayed  to  God  to 
deliver  me  from  being  an  utter  and  unspeakable 
brute.  That  was  what  my  romance  had  led  me  to — 
that  I  was  hanging  on  to  common  decency  by  the 
eyelids ! 

"You  see,  there  was  added  to  my  most  incon 
venient  and  unfitting  passion  for  the  girl  all  the 
psychology  of  return  from  a  lost  battle-field — if 
you  could  in  name  so  dignify  that  pitiful  clearing 
which  was  our  frustration.  Everything  was  over,  and 
why  the  devil  shouldn't  something  else  begin?  That 
was  the  refrain  my  blood  kept  pounding  out.  I  dare 
say  you  don't  understand — you  live  among  the  civ 
ilized,  and  are  used  to  reckoning  with  shadows.  It's 
different  out  there  on  the  well-nigh  uninhabited 
veldt.  A  platitude,  I  know.  Funny  how  people  despise 
platitudes,  when  they're  usually  the  truest  things 
218 


THE    TORTOISE 

going !  A  thing  has  to  be  pretty  true  before  it  gets  to 
be  a  platitude  at  all.  Humph! 

"We  struck  into  northeastern  Rhodesia — days 
and  days  over  the  veldt;  and  after  the  rains  it  was 
blooming  like  the  rose.  Gladiolus  everywhere — 
*  white  man's  country,  past  disputing.*  No  'baked 
karroo'  there.  Pretty  starkly  uninhabited,  though. 
Of  course,  we  were  hundreds  of  miles  north  of  the 
mines  and  the  other  activities  on  the  edge  of  the 
Transvaal.  Mashonaland,  it  would  really  be  more 
properly  called;  and  it  describes  it  better,  sounds 
wilder — as  it  was.  We  were  heading  west  across  the 
tail  of  Nyassa,  and  then  south — to  the  Zambesi  or 
the  railroad,  it  didn't  much  matter  which.  That  man 
was  as  lost  to  us,  every  corporal  vestige  of  him,  as 
if  his  ashes  had  been  scattered  like  Wycliffe's.  But 
there  on  the  rampart  above  Ravello  both  she  and  I 
had  felt  that  the  search  was  imperative :  I  no  less  than 
she.  We  were  both  pretty  young." 

His  head  dropped  on  his  breast  for  a  moment.  He 
looked  as  if  he  felt  his  burden.  I  suppose  the  tortoise 
sometimes  wonders  why.  .  .  . 

"Then,  one  afternoon,  we  dropped  into  the  heart 
219 


THE    TORTOISE 

of  a  storm — tropical  thunder,  tropical  lightning,  skies 
blacker  than  you've  ever  seen,  a  wind  that  churned 
the  heavens  into  a  pot  of  inky  broth.  I  had  been  won 
dering,  for  days,  what  we  should  do  when  we  struck 
something  besides  the  eternal  huddled  villages  of  the 
natives,  with  their  tobacco-plots  and  mealie-fields, 
their  stupid  curiosities,  their  impudent  demands  for 
gifts — something  more  like  a  house,  people  you  could 
count  people,  with  a  touch  of  white  in  their  com 
plexions.  Strange  coincidence,  that  it  was  by  the  real 
lightning-flash  that,  for  the  only  time  in  my  life,  I 
saw  her  clear;  strange,  too,  that  the  revelation 
should  have  come  on  the  heels  of  our  first  approach 
to  anything  like  civilization.  It  was  only  the  planta 
tion  of  a  man  who  had  made  his  little  pile  by  trading 
in  Kimberley,  and  had  trekked  up  to  the  edge  of  the 
wilderness  to  live  there  in  peace  with  his  aged  wife, 
and  his  cattle,  and  the  things  that  without  too  much 
trouble  he  could  coax  out  of  the  good-humored  soil. 
His  establishment  was  the  first  earnest  of  European 
activities  seething  somewhat  to  the  southward;  the 
first  reminder  of  Europe  that  we  had  had  since  leav 
ing  the  last  Portuguese  outpost  on  the  way  to  the 
220 


THE    TORTOISE 

Nyassa.  The  trip  had  not  been  hard,  as  such  trips  go: 
we  had  run  into  no  wars;  no  famine  or  drought  or 
disease  had  visited  us.  We  had  been  in  luck;  for  I 
was  a  shocking  amateur,  and  anything  like  a  real 
expedition  I  could  not  have  managed,  of  course. 
Yet,  even  so,  I  had  been  straining  my  eyes  for  the 
sight  of  a  white  man;  for  some  form  of  life  that  more 
nearly  suited  my  definition  of  'colonial/ 

"  And  so  we  stumbled  into  his  compound  at  eight 
in  the  evening,  after  endless  floundering  about  in  the 
storm.  We  had  had  to  dismount  from  our  donkeys 
and  lead  the  frightened  beasts  by  the  bridle. 
Eventually  we  could  discard  them  for  horses  or  ox 
carts,  but  for  a  little  while  still  we  might  need 
them,  and  we  clung  to  them,  though  the  temptation 
was  to  let  them  go — with  a  kick." 

Chalmers  hesitated.  "Why  do  I  find  it  so  con 
foundedly  hard  to  come  at?  I'm  not  writing  a  diary 
of  accidents  and  self-congratulations  like  the  ex 
plorer  fellows.  The  only  point  in  the  whole  thing  is 
just  what  I  can't  manage  to  bring  out!"  He  mused 
for  a  moment.  "The  whole  place  white  with  hail 
after  the  storm  .  .  .  thick  on  the  thatch  of  the  big, 


THE   TORTOISE 

rambling  house  .  .  .  the  verandah  eaves  dripping 
.  .  .  then  the  rain  stopping,  and  a  miraculous  silence 
after  the  tumult  ...  no  light  anywhere  except 
long,  low,  continual  flashes  on  the  horizon  at  the 
edge  of  the  veldt — and  then  she  came  out,  dressed 
in  something  of  the  poor  old  vrouw's  that  hung 
about  her  lovely,  slim  figure  like  a  carnival  joke.  I 
was  wondering  thickly  where  I  should  spend  the 
night.  I  had  introduced  her  as  my  wife,  of  course 
.  .  .  and  they  had  muttered  something  about  the 
other  room's  being  in  use.  The  good  old  souls  had 
gone  off  to  bed  with  the  ceasing  of  the  storm,  after 
our  little  caravan  was  housed  down  in  the  farm 
niggers'  quarters.  But  naturally  I  couldn't  have  ex 
plained  to  them,  anyhow.  .  .  .  The  lightning  was 
about  as  regular  as  a  guttering  candle  set  in  a 
draught — but  about  a  thousand  candle-power  when 
it  did  come.  And,  by  one  apocalyptic  flash,  I  saw  her 
face.  She  didn't  say  anything;  she  merely  laid  her 
hand  on  my  shoulder.  And  I,  who  had  been  bursting 
with  the  wish  to  talk,  to  tell  her,  to  lay  my  head 
on  her  knees  and  weep,  out  of  pure  self-pity  and 
desire — all  those  cub-like  emotions — didn't  say  any- 


THE   TORTOISE 

thing  either.  I  only  saw — in  that  one  flash — the 
working  of  her  lips,  the  prophetic  brilliancy  of  her 
eyes.  We  turned  and  went  into  the  house  without  a 
word.  She  wanted  me,  too;  that  was  what  it  came 
to.  Other  things  being  equal,  the  utter  isolation  of  a 
man  and  a  woman  must  do  one  of  two  things — 
must  put  a  burning  fire  or  the  polar  ice  between 
them.  I  knew  what  it  had  done  to  me;  I  hadn't 
been  able  to  guess  what  it  had  done  to  her.  I  had 
rather  been  betting  on  the  polar  ice." 

Chalmers  ruffled  both  hands  through  his  hair 
and  leaned  back  from  the  table.  His  mouth  took 
on  a  legal  twist.  "It's  the  only  thing  I  blame  my 
self  for — bar  all  the  egotism  that  youth  has  to  slough, 
and  that  I  think  I  sloughed  forever  before  I  reached 
the  damned  coast.  I  ought  to  have  known  that  half 
her  impulse  was  the  mere  clinging  of  the  frightened 
child,  and  the  other  half  the  strangeness  of  our 
journey,  which  made  us  both  feel  that  all  laws  had 
ceased  to  work  and  that  all  signs  had  failed.  I 
ought  to  have  reflected,  to  have  put  her  off,  to  have 
made  sure,  before  I  ever  took  her  into  my  arms. 
And  yet  I'm  glad  I  didn't — though  I'm  ashamed  of 
223 


THE    TORTOISE 

being  glad.  Even  then,  you  know,  I  didn't  envisage 
the  rest  of  life.  I  still  thought,  as  for  months  I  had 
thought,  that  there  could  be  no  conventional  future 
for  that  adventure.  When  my  curious  wanderjahr 
was  over,  I  expected  to  die.  And  I  wanted  to  have 
some  other  face  than  the  barren  visage  of  Romance 
— the  painted  hussy! — press  itself  to  mine  before  I 
went  out.  I  got  it;  and  I'm  not  yet  over  being  glad, 
though  it  has  made  a  coil  that  grows  tighter  rather 
than  looser  with  the  years." 

I  made  no  answer.  There  was  nothing  to  say. 
He  had  not  got  to  the  end,  and  until  the  end  what 
was  there  for  me  to  do  but  light  another  weary 
cigarette,  and  summon  all  the  sympathy  I  could  to 
my  non-committal  eyes?  On  the  face  of  it,  it  was 
merely  an  extraordinary  situation  in  which,  if  a 
man  were  once  caught,  he  could  do  little — a  new 
and  singular  kind  of  hard-luck  story.  But,  as  he 
told  it,  with  those  tones,  those  inflections,  those 
stresses,  he  certainly  did  not  seem  to  be  painting 
himself  en  beau.  I  looked  at  the  patient  figure  op 
posite  me — Chalmers  always  seemed  pre-eminently 
patient — and,  for  very  perplexity,  held  my  tongue. 


THE    TORTOISE 

"The  next  morning,  I  got  breakfast  early  and 
went  to  see  about  my  men  and  beasts.  I  was  a 
little  afraid  of  finding  the  men  drunk,  but  they 
weren't — only  full-fed  and  lazy  and  half  mutinous. 
The  guide  who  had  led  us  to  the  historic  spot  had 
vanished — deserted  in  the  night,  with  half  his  pay 
owing  him.  No  one  in  that  black  crew  could  ex 
plain.  We  had  had  desertions  before,  and  I  should 
have  considered  us  well  enough  off  simply  with  one 
coast  nigger  the  less,  if  he  hadn't  been  my  inter 
preter  as  well.  There  were  very  few  things  I  could 
say  to  the  others  without  him,  and,  though  we  were 
out  of  the  woods,  we  were  by  no  means  done  with 
our  retinue.  I  strode  back  to  the  house  in  a  fine 
rage.  I  think  I  minded  the  inconvenience  most, 
since  it  would  be  the  inconvenience  that  would  most 
affect  her.  Frankly,  you  see,  I  couldn't  suppose  she 
felt,  any  longer,  a  special  concern  with  that  par 
ticular  black  sample  of  human  disloyalty. 

"When  I  entered  the  house,  I  saw  her  at  once. 

Her  back  was  turned  to  me,  and  she  was  talking 

with  a  man  I  had  not  hitherto  seen — evidently  some 

inmate  of  the  house  whom  we  had  not  encountered 

225 


THE    TORTOISE 

the  previous  evening.  The  other  room  had  been  in 
use,  I  reflected,  in  a  flash.  He  was  stretched  on  a 
ramshackle  sofa  with  some  sort  of  animal  skin 
thrown  over  him.  He — but  I  won't  describe  him.  I 
know  every  feature  of  his  face,  though  I  saw  him, 
all  told,  not  more  than  five  minutes,  and  have 
never  seen  him  since.  I  have  a  notion" — Chalmers's 
voice  grew  very  precise,  and  his  mouth  looked  more 
legal  than  ever — "that,  when  he  wasn't  pulled  down 
with  a  long  illness  and  protracted  suffering,  he 
would  be  very  good-looking.  As  it  was,  he  was  un 
healthy  white,  like  the  wrong  kind  of  ghost.  One 
arm  was  quite  limp. 

"At  the  instant  I  didn't  place  him — naturally! 
But  as  soon  as  she  turned  her  face  to  me,  I  did. 
Only  one  thing  could  have  induced  that  look  of 
horror — horror  in  every  strained  feature,  like  the 
mask  of  some  one  who  has  seen  the  Medusa.  I 
started  to  her,  but  stopped  almost  before  I  started; 
for  I  saw  immediately  that  I  was  the  Gorgon.  It 
was  for  me  that  her  face  had  changed.  God  knows 
what,  two  minutes  before,  her  face  had  been  saying 
to  that  half -lifeless  form.  It  was  about  me  that  she 
226 


THE    TORTOISE 

felt  like  that.  Since,  with  all  the  years  to  work  it 
out  in,  I've  seen  why;  but  just  at  the  moment  I 
was  overwhelmed.  She  sat  down  in  a  chair  and 
covered  her  face  with  her  hands.  I  heard  the  man 
babbling  tragic  and  insignificant  details.  I  can't  say 
I  listened,  but  before  I  could  pull  myself  together 
and  leave,  I  caught  mention  of  fever,  accident,  loss 
of  memory,  broken  limbs,  miraculous  co-operation 
of  fate  for  good  and  evil  alike — the  whole  mad  his 
tory,  I  suppose,  from  his  side,  of  the  past  year.  I 
have  sometimes  wished  I  had  caught  it  more  clearly, 
but  just  then  I  could  take  in  nothing  except  the 
insulting  fact  that  this  was  the  man  whose  grave 
we  had  not  found.  That  was  what  her  face  had 
told  me  in  that  horrid  instant.  I  never  saw  her  face 
again.  It  was  still  bowed  on  her  hands  when  I  went 
out  of  the  door. 

"I  don't  know  how  I  got  off — I  don't  remember. 
I  suppose  I  had  the  maniac's  speed.  If  I  hadn't 
been  beside  myself,  I  think  I  could  recall  more  of 
what  I  did.  The  patriarchal  creature  under  whose 
roof  it  had  all  happened  helped  me.  I  think  I  gave 
him  a  good  many  directions  about  the  negroes  and 
227 


THE    TORTOISE 

the  kit.  Or  I  may  have  paid  them  off,  myself.  I 
honestly  don't  know.  I  know  that  I  left  nearly  all 
of  my  money  with  him,  and  started  off  on  horse 
back  alone.  I  had  a  dull  sense  that  I  was  causing 
her  some  practical  difficulties,  but  I  also  had  a  very 
vivid  sense  that  she  would  kill  herself  if  she  had  to 
encounter  me  again.  She  had  looked  at  me  as  if  I 
were  a  monster  from  the  mud.  And  the  night  before, 
on  the  verandah,  in  the  lightning  ..." 

Chalmers  stopped  and  looked  at  me.  The  bril 
liancy  had  gone  out  of  his  eyes.  He  said  nothing 
more. 

"Well?  "I  asked  finally. 

"Well?"  There  came  a  wide  shrug  of  the  shoul 
ders,  a  loosening  of  the  lips.  "I  got  back  some 
how.  I  seemed  to  be  riding,  day  and  night,  straight 
to  Hell.  But  eventually  I  got  to  Salisbury  and  took 
a  train  to  Beira.  It  was  immensely  steadying  to 
take  a  train.  I  think  any  more  of  the  veldt  would 
have  driven  me  quite  definitely  mad."  He  stopped; 
then,  in  a  moment,  jerked  out:  "That's  all." 

"Do  you  mean  that  you've  never  heard  anything 
more?" 

228 


THE    TORTOISE 

"Never  a  word.  But  I  know  that,  eventually,  she 
drew  out  every  penny  of  her  letter  of  credit.  She 
had  hardly  dipped  into  it  when  we  left  Europe." 

"Good  God!"  I  don't  know  why  I  should  have 
sat  stolidly  through  the  rest  and  have  been  bowled 
over  by  that  one  detail,  but  I  was.  It  made  the 
woman  extraordinarily  real. 

"And  of  course  she  knows  several  places  where  a 
letter  would  reach  me,  if  she  ever  had  reason  to 
write,"  he  went  on.  "Perhaps  you  see  now  why  I 
have  to  hang  on.  By  holding  my  tongue,  I've  been 
grub-staking  them  in  Arcadia,  you  might  say — but, 
damn  it,  I  know  so  little  about  it!  The  time  might 
come  ..." 

"Why  haven't  you  divorced  her  long  since?" 

His  face  hardened.  "Didn't  I  mention  that  she 
was  a  Catholic?  We  were  married  by  the  most 
orthodox  padre  imaginable.  There's  no  divorce  for 
her.  She's  the  kind  to  chuck  Heaven,  perhaps,  but 
not  her  church.  And,  unfortunately" — he  spoke  very 
slowly  and  meditatively — "our  marriage,  you  see, 
just  missed  being  the  kind  that  can  be  annulled. 
*  Unfortunately,'  I  say,  but,  even  now,  I'm  glad — 
*  229 


THE    TORTOISE 

damned  glad.  It's  quite  on  the  cards,  you  know, 
that  some  day  some  priest  may  send  her  back  to 
me.  I  might  divorce;  she  couldn't.  So  it  seems  de 
cent  for  me  not  to." 

"Well,  of  all  the—"  I  got  no  further.  The  whole 
Laokoonesque  group  had  now  completed  itself  be 
fore  me. 

Chalmers  leaned  back  and  whistled  a  bar  or  two 
from  Rigoletto.  Then:  "Never  marry  a  Catholic, 
old  man!"  he  said  in  his  lightest  voice.  But  im 
mediately  he  bent  forward  and  laid  his  hand  on 
mine.  "You  do  see  why  I  have  to  hang  on,  don't 
you?" 

I  merely  compressed  my  lips  tightly,  that  no  word 
should  come. 

"After  all,"  he  said,  turning  his  head  away,  "I 
should  like  a  chance  to  get  back  at  Romance,  some 
day.  And  the  time  may  come — what  with  spectrum 
analysis  and  all." 

I  shook  my  head.  "You  love  the  woman  still, 
Chalmers." 

"Not  I."  His  head-shake  was  more  vehement 
than  mine.  "But  I  want  to  be  on  deck  if  anything 
230 


THE    TORTOISE 

should  turn  up.  I  want  to  see  it  through.  At  least — 
I  can't  quite  see  that  I've  the  right  to  go  out." 

I  sighed.  Chalmers  had  always  gone  his  own 
way ;  and  certainly  in  this  greatest  matter  he  would 
be  tenacious,  if  ever.  He  seemed  for  the  moment  to 
have  forgotten  me,  and  sat  once  more,  his  arms  folded 
on  the  table,  his  shoulders  hunched,  as  beneath  a 
burden,  in  the  speckled  brown  coat,  his  head  moving 
slightly  from  side  to  side — again  fantastically  like 
the  tortoise  that  bears  up  the  world.  I  didn't  quite 
know  what  to  do  with  him. 

Then  a  charitable  impulse  came  to  me.  The  bar, 
I  knew,  didn't  close  until  one.  I  ordered  up  a  bottle 
of  brandy.  When  it  came  I  poured  out  enough  to 
set  the  brain  of  any  abstemious  man  humming. 
Chalmers  was  still  staring  in  front  of  him  at  the 
table.  I  wanted  him  to  sleep  that  night  at  any  cost. 
Pursuing  my  impulse,  I  pushed  the  glass  across  to 
him.  "Here;  you'd  better  take  this,"  I  said.  He 
reached  out  his  hand  mechanically,  and  mechanic 
ally  drank.  I  waited.  The  stuff  had  no  visible  effect 
on  him.  Five  minutes  later,  I  repeated  the  dose.  As 
before,  he  obeyed  me  with  a  mechanical,  an  almost 
231 


THE    TORTOISE 

mesmerized  implicitness.  Then  I  took  him  home  in 
a  cab  and  put  him  to  bed.  I  never  told,  myself,  but 
it  leaked  out — he  had  such  a  bad  hang-over — and  I 
was  much  and  enviously  congratulated.  You  see,  we 
had  all  tried,  for  five  years,  to  get  Chalmers  to  take 
a  drink. 


232 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

IT  was  like  Hoyting  to  be  lying  up  for  repairs  in 
Soerabaya  when  the  Dorriens  drifted  by;  like  him 
to  be  there  at  the  psychologic  moment;  like  him, 
above  all,  not  to  follow  up  their  trail  for  a  solu 
tion,  but  to  tack  off  into  the  China  Sea  to  renew  his 
acquaintance  with  belligerent  Mongols.  It  was  I, 
years  later,  at  Marseilles,  who  supplied  Hoyting  with 
the  last  act  of  the  play;  and  I  can  see  his  gray  eyes 
narrowing  above  his  glass  of  vermouth  as,  for  once,  he 
listened.  I  shall  have  to  put  it  together  as  best  I 
can,  though  I  shall,  as  best  I  can,  put  Hoyting's 
part  of  it  in  his  own  mouth.  I've  learned  a  kind  of 
mental  stenography  by  dint  of  listening  to  him;  and 
though  it's  unfair  to  quote  a  man  inexactly,  I'm 
not  sure  it  isn't  less  unfair  than  inditing  Hoyting's 
jerks  and  pauses,  his  zigzag  structure.  Some  of  the 
story,  as  I  say,  he  got  from  me.  That  part — most  of 
it — I'll  give  you  in  the  beginning.  After  that,  if  only 
235 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

for  the  sake  of  one  or  two  of  his  own  phrases,  I 
shall  make  shift  to  let  him  talk  as  he  talked  to  me. 
If  I  could  reproduce  for  you  that  evening  at  Mar 
seilles — Hoyting,  his  arms  folded  on  the  cafe  table, 
paying  out  his  story  unevenly,  as  if  in  response  to 
unseen  strains  and  unseen  relaxations  at  the  other 
end — oh,  as  if  Dorrien  himself  had  been  fitfully 
pulling  and  letting  go;  and  then  the  sharpening  of 
the  eyes,  the  shrug  of  the  great  shoulders,  when  I 
told  him  the  end — if  I  could,  I  might  let  it  go  at 
that.  But  you  who  know  Hoyting  will  know  that  I 
had  to  shape  it;  and  you  who  don't  might  loathe 
the  imperfectly  visualized  scene. 

Science  moves  at  an  extraordinarily  uneven  gait. 
We  laymen  follow  as  best  we  can.  I  don't  pretend 
to  make  a  history  of  medical  discoveries,  and  poor 
Dorrien's  theories  may  have  been  exploded  long 
since.  The  public  knows  only  vain  gossip  of  the 
laboratory's  "expectations"  until  the  serum  is  born. 
I  don't  even  know  how  much  he  contributed,  but  I 
do  know  that  at  one  moment  terror-stricken  multi 
tudes  were  looking  to  him  for  help.  He  had  been 
the  last  man,  in  college  days,  who  seemed  marked 
236 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

out  for  the  work  of  discovery:  easy-going,  delight 
ing  in  musical  comedy,  to  which  he  listened  with  the 
least  subtle  laugh  in  the  world.  He  married,  at  about 
thirty,  the  very  worldly  daughter  of  a  public-spirited 
American  family.  There  wasn't  anything  for  two 
centuries,  from  witch-burning  to  slave-rescuing,  the 
Hewells  hadn't  had  their  fingers  in.  The  Hewell 
spinsters  have  always  headed  intense  and  short-lived 
leagues  for  the  suppression  of  unsuspected  evils  or 
the  maintenance  of  out-dated  ideals.  The  Hewell 
men  are  bred  to  reform  as  the  English  race-horse  is 
bred  to  the  turf.  Their  marriages  are  apt  to  be 
bloodlessly  tragic. 

Agatha  Hewell — that  is,  Agatha  Dorrien — was  a 
special  case,  very  worldly,  as  I've  said.  She  didn't 
care  for  money,  but  she  cared  for  fame,  which 
meant,  she  had  the  sense  to  see,  marrying  a  clever 
man.  She  made  herself  rather  absurd,  when  she  came 
out,  by  dashing  at  celebrities;  but  she  also  made 
herself  popular  with  her  contemporaries  by  letting 
the  dancing  men  alone.  When  she  married  Dorrien, 
she  seemed  likely  to  eat  her  cake  and  have  it,  too; 
for  he  was  young  and  good-looking,  and  there  could 
237 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

be  by  that  time  no  question  about  his  ability.  She 
and  Dorrien  both  danced  a  good  deal  in  the  earlier 
years  of  their  marriage.  The  serious  Hewells  ap 
proved  of  him  none  the  less,  for  he  had  interested 
himself  pretty  constantly,  since  his  Johns  Hopkins 
days,  in  tuberculosis,  which  suited  their  public 
spirit  admirably.  The  Hewells  found  campaigns 
rather  nasty  work,  but  they  loved  legislation,  and 
Dorrien  was  always  appearing  passionately  before 
boards  and  commissions,  and  getting  "machine" 
mayors  to  lift  the  submerged  tenth  into  so  many 
cubic  feet  of  air.  He  had  always  a  natural  leaning, 
though,  it  was  interesting  to  recall  later,  to  the  mal 
adies  of  immigrants;  and  Ellis  Island  had  more  than 
once  summoned  him.  He  chafed  a  little,  in  the  end, 
under  the  vocabularies  of  boards  and  commissions, 
and  I  once  heard  him  say  that  he'd  be  damned  if 
he'd  lecture  again  to  any  woman's  club,  no  matter 
if  they  built  a  sanatorium  the  next  minute.  He  was 
flat  against  woman  suffrage,  and  said  so,  but  the 
Hewell  aunts  forgave  him  on  account  of  his  tuber 
culosis  activity.  They  called  it  a  crusade.  Agatha 
said  nothing. 

238 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

Mrs.  Dorrien  was  inexhaustibly  pretty  in  a  white 
and  gold  type,  all  purity  and  lustre;  and  she  wore 
endless  French  tea-gowns,  each  lovelier  than  the  last. 
They  doubtless  explained  Dorrien's  sticking  to  his 
fat  and  fashionable  practice  when  his  desire  was  to 
this  or  that  new  disease  out  of  Italy.  Yet  I've  heard 
her  take  him  lightly  to  task  for  letting  the  dust 
grow  thick  in  his  laboratory.  She  certainly  didn't 
think  she  wanted  money.  Nor,  I  fancy,  in  any 
bloated  and  disproportionate  way  did  she.  She 
was,  as  I  say,  ambitious — muddle-headedly,  senti 
mentally,  but  incurably  ambitious;  and  she  seemed 
always,  I've  been  told,  to  be  watching  his  career  in 
the  hope  of  its  suddenly  flaring  into  the  spectacular. 
It  was  she,  I've  also  been  told,  who  defended  Dor 
rien  from  outraged  Hewells  when  he  broke  entirely 
with  official  tuberculosis  and  turned  his  attention 
publicly  to  leprosy.  There  had  been  one  of  the  pe 
riodic  "scares";  some  respectable  artisan  in  Kansas 
City  had  developed  it  quite  unaccountably.  There 
was  a  good  deal  of  the  yellow  peril  in  the  yellow 
journals.  They  sent  for  Dr.  Dorrien.  I've  a  notion 
that  the  Misses  Hewell  were  almost  reconciled  to 
239 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

him  in  that  moment.  Mrs.  Dorrien  did  not  go  to 
Kansas  City  with  her  husband.  She  stayed  at  home, 
and  explained  to  every  one  that  leprosy  was  really 
becoming  a  public  menace,  that  the  danger  should 
be  considered,  that  steps  should  be  taken,  especially 
that  research  should  be  subsidized. 

It  had  been  a  chance  current  that  had  swept  me 
for  a  little  into  the  Dorriens'  world,  and  my  main 
stream  of  life  soon  swept  me  out  of  it.  At  the  mo 
ment  of  my  departure  from  America,  the  Kansas 
City  scare  was  over,  and  Dr.  Dorrien  had  still  done 
nothing  that  one  could  legitimately  present  to  one's 
wife  as  spectacular.  That  was  all  I  knew  of  them 
for  years — until  I  knew  the  last.  The  last  set  us  all 
to  wondering,  and  by  an  odd  chance  I  once  wondered 
aloud  before  Hoy  ting.  "Oh,  the  Dorriens?  Yes,  of 
course,  the  Dorriens.  I  knew  them." 

That  was  all,  and  it  sufficed.  Whatever  Hoyting 
knew  was  sure  to  be  the  right  answer.  It  would  take 
too  long  to  expound  Hoyting  to  those  of  you  who 
don't  know  him.  Those  of  you  who  do  will  under 
stand  my  faith.  He's  like  nothing  so  much,  I've 
sometimes  thought,  as  a  badly  tinkered  craft  plying 
240 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

between  obscure  and  unsafe  ports.  Sometimes  he 
carries  junk,  and  sometimes  treasure;  you  never 
know  beforehand.  But  I  always  bargain  for  the 
cargo.  Hoyting  has  wandered  so  much:  the  mere 
dust  on  the  crazy  little  capstan  may  have  blown 
from  some  unpronounceable  paradise.  He  doesn't 
always  know,  himself;  he  "steams  for  steaming's 
sake,"  Hoyting  does.  Somewhere  inside  his  lurching 
bulk  is  an  inexhaustible  hunger  for  life,  which  has 
made  of  two  hemispheres  an  insufficient  meal.  For 
some  of  us  he's  an  unfailing  cache  in  the  desert. 
Provided  he  has  had  life  at  first  hand,  the  jackals 
are  welcome  to  do  the  rest.  So  I  had  only  to  wait 
my  moment.  In  Marseilles,  that  haven  of  ships, 
Hoyting's  tongue  would  be  loosed.  I  should  not  have 
to  wait  long. 

"Vermouth,"  said  Hoyting;  "yes,  just  vermouth. 
I  always  did  like  Marseilles.  Full  of  people  who 
really  want  to  get  somewhere,  and  know  how  to  go, 
and  don't  talk  more  than  is  necessary.  Brindisi's 
disgusting.  I  never  touch  Brindisi  if  I  can  help  it." 

"The  Dorriens."  I  held  him  to  his  promise. 
241 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

"Oh,  the  Dorriens.  Yes.  Funny,  the  kind  of  thing 
a  woman  who  looks  like  that  is  sometimes  willing 
to  muck  about  in.  She  seemed  like  a  good  sport,  too. 
Ever  been  in  Turkestan?  I  suppose  not.  If  you  go 
to  places  in  this  world,  you  haven't  time  left  for 
anything  else.  So  very  likely  you  never  saw  a  Kir 
ghiz  nomad  hunting  on  horseback  with  a  golden  eagle 
on  his  wrist.  Using  it  like  a  falcon,  you  know.  They 
go  after  wildish  game — wolves  and  such.  Ripping. 
But  not  very  practical,  after  all.  Mrs.  Dorrien  was  a 
little  like  that.  She  was  ripping,  too.  But  I've  always 
had  a  notion  that  Dorrien  might  have  had  better 
hunting  with  almost  any  other  kind  of  woman. 

"I  don't  understand  modern  medical  science — 
scrapping  with  ultravisible  germs  that  good  may 
come.  Blood  is  different:  when  you  see  that,  it's 
your  business  to  stop  it  anyhow.  A  flow  of  blood  is 
the  devil  at  war  with  man.  You  know  it  instinc 
tively.  I  myself  don't  hold  much  with  anything  that 
doesn't  come  by  instinct.  And  as  for  deciding  things 
by  theory!  There  wasn't  a  mouldering  idea  any  one 
had  held  since  the  Christian  era  that  Mrs.  Dorrien 
didn't  drag  out  of  its  grave  to  get  help  from.  That 
242 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

was  the  trouble :  all  the  mouldering  ideas  were  knock 
ing  about  together  in  her  mind.  And  therefore,  exit 
Dorrien. 

"Do  you  know  Soerabaya?  No?  It  was  there  I  saw 
them.  I  had  known  Dorrien  long  ago  somewhere. 
There  wasn't  much  of  any  one  else  in  that  crazy 
thing  that  called  itself  a  hotel — kept  by  a  Portu 
guese  Jew  named  D'Acunha.  It  was  in  the  town, 
mind  you,  not  in  the  suburbs,  and  the  guests  ran 
accordingly.  Very  good  drinks,  and  plenty  of  mos 
quito-netting,  but  everything  else  in  the  place  that 
mosquito-netting  wouldn't  keep  out.  Mrs.  Dorrien 
always  dressed  for  dinner,  I  remember.  Dorrien 
wasn't  happy.  She  had  come  to  please  him,  though 
just  why  to  Soerabaya  I  never  made  out,  and  was 
always  reminding  him  of  it,  and  he  wasn't  pleased. 
They  had  left  the  little  girl  at  home,  and  I  dare  say 
the  mother  wanted  to  get  back  to  her.  She  kept 
saying  she  was  afraid  Aunt  Emma  wouldn't  have 
Virginia's  teeth  properly  straightened.  Wonderful 
thing  a  woman  is!  Lizards  climbing  all  round  over 
the  walls,  and  the  eternal  promise  of  a  snake  coiling 
up  on  the  tail  of  her  dress,  and  she'll  look  past  it 
243 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

all  with  her  far-sighted  eyes  and  say  she  is  afraid  a 
safe  little  kid  at  home  with  steam-heat  and  a  gov 
erness  isn't  having  her  teeth  straightened. 

"I  didn't  come  in  on  the  Dorriens'  affairs  at  all 
at  first,  you  understand.  I  was  there  on  my  own 
business,  and  I  supposed  they  were.  At  least  I  sup 
posed  he  was.  I  never  could  see  what  she  got  out  of 
it:  I'll  swear  she  never  looked  at  scenery,  and  there 
wasn't  anything  in  the  mucky  little  bazaars  she 
wanted.  Apparently  they  had  no  letters  to  Euro 
pean  residents;  or  if  they  had,  they  didn't  use  them. 
If  ever  a  woman  wasn't  meant  for  the  tropics — " 
His  voice  trailed  off  for  a  little,  then  boomed  out 
again,  softly  resonant,  like  a  ship's  gong  going  in 
termittently  somewhere  beyond  in  the  offing.  "I 
admired  her  more  than  a  little.  But  I  saw  that 
Dorrien  had  no  show.  Women  are  apt  to  shout  with 
the  majority.  How  is  a  husband  going  to  be  a  ma 
jority,  if  he  takes  a  line  of  his  own?  Oh,  Dorrien  was 
down  and  out  from  the  start. 

"They  must  have  been  worrying  along  in  Soera- 
baya  for  two  weeks.  I  think  Dorrien  stayed  on  like 
a  cross  child  who  knows  he's  got  to  go  home.  He 
244 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

drags  at  his  nurse's  hand,  and  asks  questions  about 
every  object  they  pass.  He  wasn't  interested  in  the 
place,  but  at  least  it  wasn't  a  P.  &  O.  port.  He  saw 
perfectly  that  the  next  stop  would  be.  If  I  had  had 
him  alone,  I  could  have  amused  him.  Dorrien  was 
the  sort  that  finds  an  absorbing  interest  in  native 
— eh — customs,  and  that  sort  of  thing.  But  his  wife 
naturally  didn't  care  about — sociology.  She  wan 
dered  around  under  the  teaks  and  tamarinds,  wait 
ing  for  his  last  shadow  of  an  excuse  to  fade  out 
utterly.  When  he  couldn't  chuck  the  bluff  any  more, 
she'd  have  him,  and  she  knew  it.  She'd  march  him 
home. 

"I  myself  didn't  quite  know  at  first  why  Dorrien 
wanted  to  stay  out  there.  One  would  have  to  have 
more  general  curiosity  than  the  Dorriens  appeared 
to,  in  order  to  find  Soerabaya  interesting.  I  knew  that 
if  his  wife  weren't  along,  he'd  drag  me  into  every 
kind  of  native  dive;  but  I  knew,  too,  that  he  hadn't 
come  for  the  dives.  He  didn't  seem  to  be  very  much 
in  love  with  the  place.  Who  could  be?  He  swore  at 
everything,  beginning  with  the  monkeys  and  end 
ing  with  the  prices.  He  just  didn't  want  to  go  home 
245 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

— as  if  he  knew  he'd  be  put  to  bed  in  the  dark  and 
have  to  go  to  sleep,  when  he  got  there.  Queer  guy! 
You  remember  how  big  he  was?  He  had  a  trick  of 
looking  round  any  room  as  if  it  were  too  small  for 
him.  And  that  voice  of  his,  with  never  a  modula 
tion,  and  those  red-brown  eyes  that  seemed  to  take 
in  everything  and  give  back  no  comment?  Then,  one 
night,  I  thought  I  had  struck  it.  He  came  across  to 
my  corner  of  porch  about  midnight. 

'"My  wife's  gone  to  bed,  and  I  think  she's  gone 
to  sleep,'  he  said.  *  There's  no  sleep  in  me,  and  I 
shall  swear  at  the  lizards  if  I  turn  in.  I  should  wake 
her.  You  know  what  these  fool  partitions  are.  Let's 
talk.  You  never  have  anything  to  do.'  It  wasn't 
very  polite,  but  it  was  quite  true.  I  haven't  any 
thing  to  do  except  see  what  things  are  like.  When 
I've  made  an  exhaustive  study  of  all  the  degrees  of 
civilization,  I'm  going  home  to  vote.  I  don't  see 
that,  until  then,  I'm  equipped  to. 

"'All  right,'  I  said.  'I  never  sleep,  I  never  write 
letters,  and  I  never  criticize.  Go  ahead.' 

"Odd  thing:  that  happened  to  be  just  what  he 
wanted — to  'go  ahead'  indefinitely.  I  learned  a  lot 
246 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

of  things  about  Dorrien  that  night.  I  made  out  from 
his  talk  that  he  must  have  mucked  around  a  good 
deal  with  tuberculosis  at  home,  but  he'd  dropped 
it.  He  told  me  some  queer  things  about  tuberculosis 
germs,  but  he  had  got  tired  of  it.  Exotic  diseases 
were  more  in  his  line.  He  asked  the  most  extraor 
dinary  number  of  questions  about  beri-beri  and 
things  like  that.  I  never  quite  understood  it  all;  but 
I  think  the  commonness  of  tuberculosis  bored  him. 
The  antipodes  take  men's  imaginations  in  different 
ways — who  should  know  if  I  don't? — and  they  had 
simply  taken  his,  across  all  the  world,  by  their 
physical  malignancies.  He  didn't  give  a  copper  cash 
for  what  you  folk  call  psychology,  but  his  brown 
eyes  used  to  rake  the  meanest  little  streets  in  Soera- 
baya  for  any  sign  of  disease.  It  might  have  been 
unpleasant  if  he  hadn't  been  such  a  loud-voiced, 
businesslike  chap.  If  you  ask  me,  I  should  say  he 
had  come  to  the  East  just  as  a  sportsman  goes  to 
Africa  for  big  game.  There's  good  hunting  in  Can 
ada,  I'm  told,  but  some  people  want  to  hunt  hippo 
potami  just  because  hippopotami  have  such  queer 
complexions.  Dorrien  could  get  interested  in  what 
247 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

the  human  body  is  capable  of,  regardless  of  un 
pleasantness.  But  he  could  as  well  have  stayed  at 
home  and  stuck  to  cancer,  if  he  had  wanted  mere 
unpleasantness. 

"'The  only  thing  I  know  anything  about  is  lep 
rosy,'  he  said,  that  night,  after  a  lot  of  queer  talk. 
I  very  seldom  argue;  I  just  smoke  and  wait.  You've 
got  to  assume  that  people  know  their  own  business 
best.  Dorrien  had  run  down  to  Molokai  while  his 
wife  stayed  in  Honolulu.  I've  never  been  there  my 
self.  He  told  me  a  lot  about  it  that  same  night.  He 
wasn't  romantic  pour  deux  sous,  Dorrien  wasn't; 
but  he  talked  about  it  as  if  his  heart  were  in  it. 
I  remember  an  old  missionary  chap  who  went  on 
in  the  same  way  about  the  Fijis.  Not  that  Dorrien 
held  with  the  missionaries;  but  they  both  spoke 
with  passion — as  if  sin  and  disease  could  draw  men 
like  lovers,  panting  with  blind  desire,  sheer  across 
the  planet,  just  to  help,  and  then  die.  Men  will  go 
out  and  overturn  the  stew-pots,  and  preach  vegeta 
rianism  to  cannibals,  and  go  into  the  stew-pot  them 
selves  in  the  end,  who  couldn't  stand  a  week  of 
Salvation  Army  slum- work.  Dorrien  was  something 
248 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

like  that,  only  with  the  idealism  left  out.  He  seemed 
all  passionate  perception,  like  a  child.  Yet  some 
where  in  him  was  that  thin  little  adamantine  streak 
of  pure  intellectualism.  If  it  hadn't  been  there,  he'd 
never  have  held  together  at  all:  there  must  have 
been  something  inflexible  for  all  that  clay  to  mass 
itself  upon.  And  so  he  somehow  cared,  when  it  came 
to  leprosy.  I  suppose,  some  time  or  other,  the  thing 
had  baffled  him — tantalized  him  like  an  unscrupu 
lous  woman. 

"It's  no  use  saying,  'Why  didn't  he  love  else 
where?'  He  happened  not  to.  Meanwhile  his  wife 
was  taking  him  home  to  a  fashionable  practice  which 
he  was  sadly  endangering  by  absence.  And  there 
were  the  little  girl's  teeth,  you  see.  There  had  been 
some  excuse  of  a  holiday  combined  with  study  of 
special  conditions  in  the  Orient,  but  all  excuses  had 
expired.  He  was  facing  a  P.  &  O.  boat,  and  he  was 
just  sparring  for  time.  It  was  all  rather  a  mess,  as 
I  had  learned  by  three  in  the  morning.  But  it  dis 
tinctly  wasn't  a  mess  that  an  outsider  had  anything 
to  do  with.  To  tell  the  truth,  if  Mrs.  Dorrien  hadn't 
seemed  such  a  good  sport,  I'd  have  had  more  faith 
249 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

in  him;  but  who  can  ever  tell?  He  left  me  finally 
and  went  to  bed,  and  the  next  day  Mrs.  Dorrien 
went  into  the  town  to  look  up  steamer  connections 
while  he  made  up  sleep.  At  least,  that  was  the  ac 
count  she  gave. 

"I  went  off  into  the  interior  for  a  few  days;  pre 
tended  I  was  going  to  look  up  a  lot  of  ruins  that,  of 
course,  I'd  seen  before — tombs  of  Arab  priests  and 
such.  The  hotel  had  got  on  my  nerves,  and  the  sub 
urbs,  full  of  Europeans,  were  even  less  what  I  was 
looking  for.  Besides,  the  Dorriens  weren't  my  affair; 
yet  Dorrien  was  beginning  to  clutch  me  as  if  they 
were.  I  wouldn't  run  away  from  any  solitary  crea 
ture,  either  man  or  woman — and  I've  been  in  some 
strange  galleys,  too — but  when  it  comes  to  man  and 
wife,  'ruf9  nicht  die  Polizei,9  as  the  Germans  have  it. 
The  Dorriens  looked  to  me  pretty  near  the  break 
ing-point.  I  hoped  they  would  either  leave  or  have 
it  out  before  I  got  back.  When  I  got  away,  I  forgot 
about  it.  I'm  foot-loose,  and  nobody's  business  is 
really  mine.  Fancy  being  responsible  to  and  for  a 
white-and-gold  creature  like  Mrs.  Dorrien!  The  very 
thought  of  it  makes  you  want  to  take  ship. 
250 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

"That  particular  interior  wasn't  much  good — 
eternal  rice-fields,  and  little  villages,  one  just  like 
another,  full  of  little  people.  The  vegetation  was 
something  you  couldn't  dream,  even  on  hashish,  but 
I'm  dead  used  to  vegetation.  I  nosed  around  for  a 
few  days,  and  then  decided  to  quit  the  island  en 
tirely.  I  had  engagements  elsewhere,  if  I  chose  to 
think  so.  Anyhow,  I  wanted  something  doing.  So 
I  went  back  to  Soerabaya.  You  get  boats  from  there 
all  over. 

"They  said  at  the  hotel  that  the  Dorriens  were 
leaving  the  next  day.  I  didn't  look  them  up;  but 
when  I  came  down  to  dinner,  Mrs.  Dorrien  was  in  her 
place,  waiting  for  her  husband.  She  beckoned  to  me 
and  smiled,  and  I  had  to  go  over,  though  she  looked 
more  like  a  Frenchwoman  than  ever,  and  I  was 
more  a  sweep  than  usual.  I  had  to  go;  but  I  went 
thinking  what  a  damn  subtle  thing  marriage  is  at 
home,  and  how  glad  I  was  to  be  single.  There  are 
other  sides  to  it,  of  course;  but  that's  the  perma 
nent  one.  Think  of  being  married  to  a  woman  who 
would  dress  like  that  for  an  undercooked,  half-caste 
dinner  in  a  steaming  Soerabaya  hotel!  Think,  that 
251 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

is,  of  what  she  must  be  like  at  close  range.  She  made 
me  sit  down. 

"We  are  leaving  to-morrow,  Mr.  Hoy  ting.' 

"'  Sorry.'  I  couldn't  screw  out  more. 

"'Yes.  We've  had  our  mail.  We  have  to  go.'  She 
straightened  her  shoulders  and  swept  the  room  with 
a  bored  look,  as  if  it  were  a  ballroom  full  of  men 
who  danced  badly.  I  didn't  know  whether  she  was 
lying  about  the  mail  or  not.  I  never  get  letters,  thank 
God!  I  haven't  any  address.  What  was  certain  was 
that  I  did  not  want  her  to  tell  me  what  was  in  their 
mail.  I  sidestepped. 

"'I  don't  suppose  Soerabaya  will  soon  see  the  like 
of  that  dress  again,  Mrs.  Dorrien.'  It  was  the  most 
civilized  thing  I'd  seen  in  a  long  time,  though  of 
course  I  don't  frequent  table  d'hotes  in  most  places. 
Anyhow,  you  know  how  colonial  Dutch  women  get 
themselves  up.  'Aren't  you  afraid  the  lizards  will 
spoil  it?' 

"'This  rag?'  The  'rag'  was  gold-colored,  as  she 

was,  and  her  laugh  clinked  like  gold.  'I  shall  give 

it  to  the  stewardess  if  she  is  half  decent  to  me.  We 

shall  have  to  stop  in  Paris  on  the  way  back.  I  haven't 

252 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

had  so  much  as  a  new  sarong  since  we  left  America. 
My  clothes  are  faded,  tattered,  fly-blown,  tarnished 
with  the  sea/  She  shrugged  her  shoulders. '  Is  it  really 
so  long  since  you've  seen  a  well-dressed  woman? 
Surely  in  India — '  That  was  the  best  she  could  do 
for  badinage,  and  she  looked  uneasily  towards  the 
door  as  she  spoke. 

"Suddenly  Dorrien  appeared  in  the  door.  She 
was  silent  through  our  greetings,  though  I  thought 
she  watched  him.  Whatever  it  was  would  break  be 
fore  morning,  if  it  wasn't  already  at  that  instant 
giving  way.  They  hadn't  many  hours'  grace,  those 
two.  Why  the  devil  hadn't  I  stayed  in  some  undis- 
coverable,  soaking  little  basket-hovel  in  the  nearest 
village  until  the  next  morning?  I  didn't  know  the 
people,  I  didn't  like  them;  but  both  of  them  would 
cling  to  me  because  I  was  white  and  because  they  . 
couldn't  agree  about  anything  in  the  world.  I've 
always  wished  I  had  stayed  away  twenty -four  hours 
more,  that  time — always.  There  was  no  reason  under 
high  .heaven  why  I  should  be  in  it.  And  they  were 
nice  people,  mind  you;  and  neither  one  of  them  meant 
to  be  a  cad.  Why,  there  was  nothing  either  one  of 
253 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

them  wanted  that  wasn't  perfectly  decent  and  de 
sirable  in  itself.  They  only  wanted  different  things 
for  each  other,  with  the  best  conscience  in  the  world. 
And  people  go  on  marrying,  every  day ! 

;"I  hear  you're  going,  Dorrien.'  There  was  no 
use  in  trying  to  be  irrelevant.  They  would  have 
turned  any  remark  into  a  comment  on  themselves. 

'"Did  Agatha  tell  you  so?' 

'  *  Yes.  And  D'Acunha  mentioned  it  when  I  got  in.' 
"There's  a  P.  &  O.  boat  from  Singapore  next 
week  Thursday/  She  looked  straight  at  him. 

'"There's  a  Royal  Dutch  Mail  from  Batavia  next 
week  Saturday,'  he  flung  back. 

"  She  drew  a  scarf  round  her  shoulders,  despite  the 
steaming  heat.  'Who  wants  to  go  to  Rotterdam?  If 
we're  going,  let's  go  sanely.' 

"'We  can't  go  sanely.'  And  Dorrien  was  white 
beneath  his  sunburn  as  he  said  it. 

"Some  other  people  came  in,  and  I  didn't  scruple 
to  talk  to  them.  If  the  Dorriens  were  going  to  break, 
I,  out  of  sheer  patriotism,  didn't  want  them  to  break 
before  a  public  like  that.  Perhaps  I  still  had  some 
hope  of  getting  away.  I've  forgotten  about  that,  but 
254 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

it  seems  reasonable.  I  do  remember  that  I  staved 
it  off  until  after  dinner.  But  they  didn't  let  me  alone. 
They  wanted  a  referee,  I  imagine;  some  one  who 
would  keep  them  from  screaming  insults  at  each 
other,  or  decide  between  them  when  they  did. 

"There's  something  morally  disintegrating  about 
heat.  I  fancy  that's  been  said  before,  but  I  know 
how  true  it  is.  My  own  nerves  were  on  edge  with  it. 
Why  didn't  they  go  up  into  the  mountains  some 
where  and  dance  with  Dutch  residents,  instead  of 
sticking  to  ports?  But  I  suppose  that  would  only 
have  postponed  the  catastrophe.  Anyhow,  it  couldn't 
hurt  either  of  them  to  get  out  of  that  rotten  tem 
perature,  no  matter  where  they  went.  She  was  whiter 
than  chalk,  and  Dorrien  was  nervous  as  a  cat.  Her 
voice  jangled,  and  he  twitched  all  over  when  she 
spoke.  I  didn't  see  that  there  was  a  penny  to  choose 
between  them  for  merit,  except  that  she  was  stronger 
than  he.  They'd  both  break,  but  he'd  break  hah"  a 
minute  sooner.  Ugh!  it  was  bad!" 

Hoyting  breathed  in  the  wind  that  blew  gently 
against  us  off  the  Mediterranean  waves.  "You  don't 
know  anything  about  heat.  Dry  heat  doesn't  mat- 
255 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

ter.  When  there's  nothing  but  steam  to  breathe — 
everything  hot  and  vaporous  and  reeking — temper 
ate  people  lose  their  poise.  Soerabaya  was  like  hold 
ing  your  head  over  a  teakettle.  Yes,  I  was  sorriest 
for  Dorrien.  But  why  didn't  they  go  to  the  moun 
tains  and  have  it  out,  if  they  had  to,  in  paradise?" 

He  was  silent  for  some  moments  over  his  vermouth. 
I  didn't  interrupt.  I  knew  the  rest  would  come.  Un 
easy  reminiscence  of  the  kind  then  wrinkling  his 
face  would  only  expedite  his  narrative.  When  he 
began  again,  it  was  abruptly,  with  a  change  of  tone; 
but  his  eyes  had  never  moved  from  the  harbor  lights. 

"I  was  sorriest  for  Dorrien.  I  asked  him  over  to 
smoke  on  my  porch.  Your  porch  is  your  sitting-room, 
you  know,  and  you  don't  go  inside  until  you  have 
to.  I  said,* Let's  throw  bananas  to  the  monkeys.'  The 
heat  had  gone  to  my  head  a  little,  too — heat  and 
annoyance.  He  moved  off  at  once.  'All  right,'  he 
said.  'Can't  I  come  and  throw  bananas  to  the  mon 
keys?'  said  Mrs.  Dorrien.  'Of  course.'  We  were  all 
unnaturally  serious,  you  see — a  bad  sign.  I  was  in 
it,  then,  for  as  long  as  they  chose  to  stay.  What  fool 
invented  hospitality,  I  wonder? 
256 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

"Dorrien  had  a  little  sense  left.  He  began  at 
once.  'I've  got  a  case  of  conscience  to  put  to  you, 
Hoy  ting/  Even  then  I  hoped  I  could  stave  it  off. 

"'Conscience  is  a  local  matter,'  I  answered;  'ter- 
ritoriality  of  law.  Don't  appeal  to  me.  I'm  an  out 
sider.' 

"' Aren't  we  all  in  Soerabaya  together?'  Her  voice 
rasped  its  way  in. 

"'Yes;  but  I  hope  you  don't  mean  to  decide  any 
thing  according  to  Soerabaya.' 

'"Do  you  really  think  at  the  moment  we're  ca 
pable  of  doing  otherwise?'  She  had  me  there:  it  was 
the  mean  truth.  We  weren't.  That  reeking  heat 
would  decide  for  us.  I  don't  think  she  had  meant 
him  to  appeal  to  me,  but  I  fancy  she  didn't  mind. 
If  he  hadn't  done  it,  she  would  have.  It  was  inevi 
table. 

"Dorrien  went  on:  'I  had  a  letter  when  the  mails 
came  in  two  days  ago,  offering  me  a  big  post.  Agatha 
and  I  don't  agree  about  it.' 

"'You  don't  think  it  big  enough?'  I  was  so  re 
lieved  that  I  thought  I  could  speak  lightly — Heaven 
forgive  my  folly!  If  it  was  just  some  little  feud  of 
257 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

their  ambitions,  they'd  be  all  right  as  soon  as  they 
were  off  the  land.  But  her  face  didn't  relax. 

"  '  He  has  been  offered  the  chance  of  exiling  him 
self  on  Molokai  with  eight  hundred  lepers.'  She  had 
brought  the  jangling  tones  into  a  kind  of  ironic 
gamut.  'That  is  the  kingdom  he  is  offered.  And  he 
thinks — my  God!  he  wants  to  go!'  She  broke  down 
utterly  and  wept,  great  sobs,  like  a  man's,  coming 
up  from  her  chest  and  shaking  her  frail  body.  Women 
don't  usually  cry  that  way;  there's  trouble  in  it 
when  they  do. 

"'But  he  isn't  going.'  It  was  only  decent  to  com 
fort  her.  'You  say  you  are  sailing  for  Europe.' 

"Dorrien  did  not  speak.  Her  sobs  slowed  gradu 
ally.  She  was  making  a  terrible  effort  for  the  power 
to  speak  coherently,  to  get  in  her  arguments,  her 
pleas,  her  threats.  I  suppose  I  was  her  last  dim  sub 
stitute  for  public  opinion.  She  was  trying  to  bring 
the  world  to  bear  on  him  in  Soerabaya,  and  there 
was  only  I  to  be  the  world. 

"Now,  how  could  I  have  known  I  was  going  to 
run  into  a  thing  like  that,  out  there  on  the  other 
edge  of  Java?  Do  I  look  like  Mrs.  Grundy?  She 
258 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

hated  me,  mind  you;  she  was  terribly  afraid  of  me; 
she  couldn't  a  bit  trust  me  to  see  the  thing  her  way; 
but  there  was  no  one  else.  I  was  an  American,  and 
I  had  had  the  bad  luck  to  know  Dorrien  long  before. 
She  wasn't  trying  any  feminine  wiles;  she  was  just 
pleading  for  civilization,  as  she  understood  it,  against 
mad  and  monstrous  ideas  that  she  hadn't  dreamed 
existed,  except  inaccessibly.  Caste  goes  deeper  than 
sex — among  us,  anyhow.  I  don't  know  what  she 
thought  about  Dorrien,  really.  Probably  he  merely 
seemed  to  her,  for  the  moment,  to  have  obliterated 
deliberately  all  his  caste-marks.  I've  always  held 
that,  if  a  man  did  the  work,  it  wasn't  up  to  the 
woman  to  tell  him  how  to  do  it;  and  I  remembered 
how  Dorrien  had  felt  about  leprosy.  Probably  he 
could  do  good  work  there.  I  fancied  he  knew  what 
he  wanted.  Some  one  had  to  be  at  Molokai;  why,  or 
why  not,  Dorrien? 

"  I  looked  at  him.  He  was  sitting  perfectly  straight 
and  uncomfortable,  his  mad  eyes  fixed,  as  if  they 
were  glass,  on  the  palm-boughs  out  beyond  the 
smoky  porch-lamp.  Nothing  to  be  done  there.  And 
when  I  turned  back  to  her,  I  simply — oh,  aboini- 
259 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

nably,  I  grant  you — laughed  aloud.  The  notion  of 
expecting  a  woman  like  that  to  live  on  a  leper 
island !  It  had  been  bad  enough  to  see  her  in  Soera- 
baya.  I  was  sorry,  fundamentally  and  genuinely 
sorry,  for  Dorrien;  but  it  ought  to  have  been  patent 
even  to  him  that  Mrs.  Dorrien  couldn't  go  to  Mo- 
lokai.  Nothing  but  an  exclusive  love,  the  kind  we've 
all  heard  about  and  never  experienced,  would  have 
made  her  do  it.  She  and  Dorrien  had  nothing  of 
that  sort  to  go  upon,  I  was  absolutely  sure. 

"'But  you're  sailing.'  I  clung  to  Dorrien's  ex 
plicit  words. 

'"By  Heaven,  I'm  not!'  His  lips  just  moved.  He 
looked  like  a  statue  conceived  in  madness,  carved 
with  scorn. 

:"I  grant  some  one  has  to  go' — she  was  appar 
ently  trying  to  be  extraordinarily  generous — 'but 
why  he?  It's  not  his  place  or  his  life.  It's  not  what 
he's  fit  for.  It's  not  asked  of  him.  He  has  me;  he 
has  Virginia.  Virginia!'  She  had  turned  to  me,  her 
shoulder  blotting  out  Dorrien.  It  seemed  that  they 
had  to  communicate  through  me;  they  had  ceased 
to  address  each  other.  'Has  he  a  right,'  she  went 
260 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

on,  'to  take  us  to  a  place  like  that?  Has  a  husband, 
a  father,  no  responsibilities?  Even  if  I  don't  mat 
ter,  must  Virginia  live  and  die  among  those  mon 
sters?' 

"How  could  I  say,  I  ask  you,  that  Virginia  must? 
I  had  never  seen  Virginia.  I  had  nothing  to  do  with 
these  people.  Why  didn't  they  see  that?  I  don't 
believe,  you  know,  that  they  ever  saw  it.  I  might 
have  been  Rhadamanthus  in  a  poor  disguise. 

"Mrs.  Dorrien  stopped,  and  cried  quietly  into  her 
handkerchief.  Her  husband  took  up  the  talk. 

;<<God  knows  I've  wasted  life  long  enough.  It's  a 
chance  in  a  million,  man — the  one  chance  in  the 
whole  world.  Give  me  ten  years  there,  and  I'll 
know,  I  tell  you.  I'll  find  a  cure.  I'll  track  the 
filthy  germ.  I've  never  had  half  a  show,  pulling 
old  ladies  through  bronchitis.  It's  no  work  for  a 
man.  I've  been  ashamed  to  look  at  myself  in  a  glass 
for  two  years.  I've  gone  a  little  way;  I  swear  I'm 
on  the  right  track.  It's  the  kind  of  thing  I  can  do. 
I  haven't  a  bedside  manner;  Agatha  has  that.  Those 
poor  wretches  don't  need  a  bedside  manner.  They 
need  some  one  to  avenge  them.  She's  ambitious. 
261 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

Well,  let  her  give  me  my  head  for  ten  years,  and 
she  can  cover  herself  with  my  medals.  We'll  come 
back,  when  I've  done  my  work,  and  she  can  queen 
it  all  over  Europe.' 

"He  was  incoherent,  overweening,  inconsequent, 
but  terrifyingly  in  earnest.  More  probably  than  not, 
she  would  have  a  suicide  on  her  hands,  I  thought, 
if  she  did  take  him  home.  It  didn't  look  as  if  she 
would  get  him  past  Suez. 

"Mrs.  Dorrien  sat  with  her  hands  folded  in  her 
lap,  breathing  hard,  but  quite  silent.  They  were 
appalling,  that  pair.  I'd  have  given  a  good  deal  to 
hear  a  little  repartee  just  then.  But  the  mortal  insult 
would  have  been  to  suggest  that  either  one  should 
speak  to  the  other.  The  queerest  night  I  ever  spent, 
and  I've  been  through  some  I  didn't  believe  in,  my 
self,  the  next  day.  Well,  all  I  wanted  was  to  have  it 
over;  I  didn't  care  how  brutally  I  hastened  it. 

"'Why  don't  you  go  alone?' 

"He  looked  at  me  then;  he  had  only  spoken  to 
me  before.  Dominated  by  that  look,  I  began  to  piece 
together  my  own  scraps  of  traveller's  knowledge. 
Then  I  kicked  myself.  I  didn't  need  all  the  unphrase- 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

able  explanations  that  gathered  silently  in  his  eyes. 
I  knew,  of  course,  what  he  just  refrained  from  re 
plying.  It  was  the  last  leash  on  him — the  thinnest 
thread  of  control.  If  that  snapped,  if  I  jerked  it, 
we  should  be  saying,  all  three  of  us  together,  mon 
strous  things.  I  held  hard  on  the  leash. 

'"He  can't  go  alone.'  Her  voice  was  just  a  whis 
per.  She  was  shocked  to  the  core  of  her,  and  I  saw 
that,  to  that  extent  at  least,  they  had  had  it  out.  I 
was  sorry  for  her  then — sorry  without  regard  to  my 
fast-ebbing  admiration.  She  had  been  flung  on  the 
horns  of  a  dilemma,  and  they  were  goring  her  cruelly. 
They  couldn't,  poor  devils,  get  peace  with  honor." 

Hoyting  ordered  more  vermouth,  and  lighted  the 
next  of  the  undiminishing  procession  of  cigarettes. 
He  wandered  away  from  the  actual  story  for  a  little, 
and  I  let  him,  knowing  that  in  the  end  he  would 
get  his  fox  and  goose  and  bag  of  corn  all  safe  across, 
like  the  man  in  the  riddle. 

"Dorrien  wasn't  the  sort  of  man  you'd  expect  to 
find  in  scientific  research.  He  was  too  human,  too 
impressionable.  A  scientist  oughtn't  to  notice  Java 
nese  singing  girls.  They  ought  to  be  to  him  as  the 
263 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

female  of  the  flounder.  I  don't  mean  for  a  minute 
that  Dorrien  was  a  cad,  that  he  was  anything  but 
— complete.  He  was  a  scientist  of  sorts,  at  least  by 
predilection;  but  he  was  also  healthy  and  immensely 
masculine.  He  couldn't  personify  Science  and  then 
treat  her  as  if  she  were  really  a  woman.  He  knew 
the  difference.  I've  seen  men  who  didn't.  They  are 
the  lucky  ones.  Dorrien  was  unlucky:  he  had  no 
end  of  conflicting  desires.  He  wanted  abnormal  con 
ditions  plus  a  normal  life;  and  he  wanted  a  little 
fame  thrown  in.  I  dare  say  he  also  wanted  Mrs. 
Dorrien  and  the  little  girl  whose  teeth  had  to  be 
straightened.  Just  at  that  moment,  he  thought  he 
wanted  more  than  all  the  rest  a  chance  to  do  his 
appointed  work.  But  he  was  honest,  damn  him! 
honest.  He  knew  that  Science  could  never,  for  him, 
be  a  mistress,  and  he  wasn't  a  man  to  exist  on 
merely  Platonic  relations.  I've  always  admired  him 
for  not  blinking  facts  when  he  must  have  been  sorely 
tempted  to.  But  what  they  must  have  gone  through, 
of  bitter  exposition,  those  two,  in  the  days  of  my 
absence!  I  didn't  see  any  way  out  of  it.  He  wanted 
incompatible  goods.  And  so,  by  heavens!  did  she." 
264 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

Hoyting  dropped  his  chin  on  his  chest  and  closed 
his  eyes  wearily  for  a  moment. 

"  If  she  had  been  a  different  sort,  even,  they  might 
have  pulled  through.  But  look  at  it.  She  was  ambi 
tious  and  sentimental.  She  wanted  his  success. 
She'd  have  been  willing  enough  to  send  him  out 
alone  if  he  had  lied  to  her  about  possibilities.  He 
had  had  the  honesty  to  realize  them,  and  the  utter 
brutality  to  tell  her — that  was  perfectly  clear  from 
the  state  of  both  of  them.  Probably  he  didn't  think 
he  had  a  right  to  withhold  the  information  from  her; 
or  he  might  have  thought  it  would  be  a  clinching 
argument  for  her  going  with  him.  If  you  ask  me, 
I  think  she  was  very  near  hating  him  for  having 
enlightened  her  as  to  the  dangers.  Women  of  her 
kind  don't  like  such  assumptions.  And  it  didn't  give 
her  a  beau  role.  There  wasn't  anything,  and  wouldn't 
be,  God  knows,  for  her  to  be  jealous  of.  But  there 
was  everything  prospectively,  if  he  went,  to  pity 
him  for.  A  wife  couldn't  fling  him  into  that;  not 
when  he  wouldn't  even  pose,  not  when  he  didn't 
scruple  to  say  what  she  was  flinging  him  into.  How 
ever  much  she  may  have  wanted  to  say  *Go,'  she 
265 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

couldn't.  If  he  had  only  pretended  to  be  other  than 
he  was,  she  could  have  made  it  out  to  herself  that 
both  of  them  were  martyrs,  he  to  his  work,  she  to 
— oh,  well,  to  the  little  girl.  She  was  the  kind  of 
woman  who  could  condone  an  infidelity,  I  imagine, 
in  a  cold,  superior  way;  but  her  principles  would 
hardly  permit  her  to  face  it  beforehand.  And  that 
wasn't  all — that  wasn't  all.  Of  course  she  had  asked 
him  first  of  all — she  would  have — about  the  danger 
of  infection;  and  it  was  evident  from  every  suffer 
ing  line  in  both  their  faces  that  he  hadn't  hesitated 
to  dot  his  i's.  She  knew  what  was  dangerous  and 
what  was  not,  and  she  knew  that  if  Dorrien  went 
alone  he  was  lost.  I  pitied  her.  She  had  hunted, 
during  two  days,  for  a  beau  role,  and  she  couldn't 
find  one.  Her  only  hope  was  to  get  him  home  and 
trust  that  he  would  get  over  it,  like  some  kind  of 
fit.  And  he  wouldn't;  that  was  clear.  The  only  sug 
gestion  I  could  think  of  was  that  they  should  di 
vorce,  and  that  he  should  proceed  to  find  another 
woman  who  adored  him,  and  take  her  out  there. 
That  isn't  the  kind  of  suggestion  you  make  to 
people;  it  doesn't  sound  sympathetic.  It  isn't  prac- 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

tical,  either;  it  leaves  too  much  to  be  done  too 
quickly.  Moreover,  it  had  almost  certainly  never 
occurred  to  either  of  them  that  they  didn't  love 
each  other  as  much  as  any  other  two  people  did. 

"And  they  expected  me  to  say  something!  They 
had  spent  forty-eight  hours  trying,  quite  in  vain,  to 
find  a  way  out,  and  then  had  the  appalling  cheek 
and  the  pathetic  confidence  to  bring  it  to  me! 

"'I  can't  argue  this  matter,'  I  said  finally.  'You 
must  see  that.' 

"They  didn't  see  it.  It  was  a  perfectly  imper 
sonal  clutch  they  were  strangling  me  with.  They 
hadn't  any  notion  of  their  own  dismaying  breach 
of  reticence.  We  were  all  in  Soerabaya — which  was 
hell — together;  and  conventions  didn't  exist.  Also, 
I  couldn't  any  more  get  out  of  it  than  if  we  had 
been  more  literally  in  Hell  and  they  ineluctable  and 
imperishable  shades.  I  had  to  go  on. 

"'She  won't  go,'  I  said  at  last  to  Dorrien.  'And 
you  absolutely  can't  go  alone?' 

"He  didn't  speak,  but  he  turned  his  eyes  on  me 
again.  I  seemed  to  read  in  them  that  the  question 
had  been  put  to  him  before,  and  that  he  would  not 
267 


THE   DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

again  go  through  the  agony  of  answering.  Not  that 
the  answer  in  those  silent  eyes  wasn't  clear.  Then, 
after  a  little,  he  did  speak.  'Ask  her  if  she  coun 
sels  me  to  go  alone.* 

"My  very  spirit  revolted  at  the  way  they  had 
laid  hands  on  me.  Anything  I  said  was  bound  to  be 
damnable  for  one  or  the  other  of  them.  I  swore  I'd 
get  out  of  the  thing  non-partisan  if  I  insulted  them 
both. 

"'I  won't  ask  her,'  I  said.  'I  won't  have  anything 
more  to  do  with  it.  It's  a  devilish  mess,  and  one  of 
you  has  to  go  under.  But  I  won't  lift  a  finger  to  de 
termine  which  one.  You  may  take  that  from  me 
straight,  both  of  you.' 

"We  ought  by  rights  to  have  been  tearing  about 
that  porch  dramatically;  but  we  all  sat  perfectly 
still  in  sheer  exhaustion,  dripping  with  sweat  and 
breathing  in  quiet,  regular  pants.  I  wish — I  wish  it 
had  never  been. 

"'You  won't  even  tell  him  that  he  can't  go  at 
all?  Such  a  simple  thing  as  that?'  She  flung  out  her 
hands  in  a  queer,  uncertain  way.  She  was  very  far 
gone. 

268 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

"'I  won't  tell  him  anything.  Good  night.'  I  pulled 
myself  out  of  my  chair  and  leaned  over  the  railing. 
I  don't  know  how  long  I  looked  down  into  the  hot 
little  garden.  I  didn't  mean  to  be  a  beast.  Were  you 
ever  in  a  place  where  you  couldn't  stir  a  muscle  with 
out  committing  murder?  No,  I  suppose  not.  Well, 
that's  what  I  felt  like.  It  seemed  inevitable  that 
pretty  soon  they'd  trap  me  into  saying  something 
that  sounded  like  advice;  and  it  looked  to  me  as 
if  any  advice,  once  followed,  would  be  fatal.  There 
wasn't  any  right  way  out,  they  being  what  they 
were.  It  was  up  to  whatever  Power  had  made  them. 
It  was  absolutely  not  up  to  me.  I  began  counting 
lizards  on  the  railing.  Every  bone  in  my  body  ached 
with  stiffness  when  I  finally  turned  round.  They 
had  gone." 

Hoyting  lighted  a  cigarette.  He  had  finished  it, 
and  lighted  another,  before  he  spoke  again. 

"The  next  morning  I  got  off  on  a  filthy  little 
tramp  steamer  at  four  o'clock.  It  wasn't  a  steamer 
the  Dorriens  could  possibly  take.  I  don't  think  they 
would  even  have  known  about  it.  Then  I  made 
straight  for  China;  I  was  pretty  sure  neither  one  of 
269 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

them  would  think  of  China.  And  by  that  time  I  had 
got  back  nerve  enough  to  be  quite  sure  that  I  had 
done  right  in  keeping  my  hands  off.  But — I  never 
asked  any  one  what  became  of  them.  Now  you  say 
you  know." 

"Oh,  yes,  I  know.  Dorrien's  dead." 

"They  went  back?" 

"Yes,  they  went  back.  That  was  eight  years  ago?" 

Hoyting  began  to  count  up  the  continents  on  his 
fingers.  "Australia  last  year — South  America — Si 
beria — the  Transvaal,  before  that.  Yes,  it  would 
have  been  eight  years  ago." 

To  my  surprise,  I  found  myself  reluctant  to  bring 
out  the  truth.  Hoyting,  as  he  talked,  had  been  so 
vividly  aware  of  the  Dorriens,  had  made  it  so  evident 
how  real  to  him  and  repellent  was  that  remembered 
scene,  that  my  hesitation  was  not  unnatural. 

"He  practised  at  home  for  a  number  of  years, 
doing  some  research  when  he  had  time.  He  went 
back  into  public  work  to  some  extent — boards  and 
commissions  again.  Her  family  seemed  to  manage 
him  entirely."  Then  I  stopped. 

Hoyting  waited.  The  lights  in  the  harbor  began 
270 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

to  lessen,  great  patches  of  shadow  spacing  them.  I 
waited,  too,  to  gather  strength.  It  had  all  become 
horrible  to  me  now,  and  permeated  with  the  sordid- 
ness  that  spoils  tragedy. 

"He  shot  himself." 

"He  cared  so  much  as  that?"  Hoyting's  huge 
finger  flicked  off  the  cigarette  ash  before  there  was 
need. 

"He  had — oh,  I  only  heard  it,  Hoyting!"  I  cried. 
"I  don't  know  the  whole  of  it.  Who  does?  But  those 
damned  Hewells  took  it  up — I  suppose  by  way  of 
condoning  the  suicide — and  made  a  martyr  of  him." 

"Go  on." 

"He  had  somehow  in  the  laboratory — you  know 
the  danger;  and  Dorrien  was  a  reckless  chap,  those 
last  years,  not  like  himself,  his  friends  said.  They 
all  used  to  worry  over  his  riding,  his  shooting,  his 
yachting — everything." 

I  broke  off.  It  was  extremely  hard  to  tell  the  man 
who  apparently  knew  most  about  Dorrien,  even 
though  he  had  never  called  Dorrien  friend.  "He 
had  somehow,  through  a  cut,  the  slip  of  an  instru 
ment — I  don't  know  the  sickening  scientific  detail 
271 


THE    DIVIDED    KINGDOM 

of  it — inoculated  himself  with  a  disease  he  was 
working  with.  He  made  nothing  of  it  at  the  time, 
I'm  told.  Everybody  had  forgotten  it.  Suddenly — 
when  he  found  out  what  he  was  in  for,  I  suppose — 
he  shot  himself.  After  what  you've  told  me,  I  should 
say  it  was  probably  from  disgust.  Why  blame  him?" 

"What  was  it?"  Hoyting  had  not  stirred,  but  his 
voice  had  changed  immeasurably. 

"Tuberculosis." 

The  great  shoulders  shrugged  once.  I  felt  im 
pelled  to  explain — a  miserable  little  feverish  strut. 
And  before  Hoyting,  of  all  men! 

"It  gives  the  measure  of  his  revolt — a  man  who 
had  cured  so  many,  and  could  have  cured  himself 
mechanically,  you  might  say;  a  man  whose  special 
business  in  life  had  been  to  snap  his  fingers  at  that 
particular  plague.  That's  why,  until  you  told  me 
all  this,  I  never  understood.  Now  it's  clear  enough." 

I  shut  my  eyes,  glad  to  put  the  ironic  thing  away, 
glad  to  be  at  peace,  with  no  further  need  to  speak 
of  it.  When  I  opened  them  again,  I  was  alone.  Hoy- 
ting,  the  foot-loose,  was  gone. 


272 


THE    CASE   OF    PARAMORE 


THE    CASE   OF   PARAMORE 

rOR  the  sake  of  moral  values  I  ought  to  wish,  I 
suppose,  that  Paramore  had  been  a  more  conspicu 
ous  figure.  There  is  moral  significance  in  the  true 
tale  of  Paramore — the  tale  which  has  been  left  to 
me  in  trust  by  Hoyting.  I  cursed  Hoyting  when  he 
did  it;  for  Paramore's  reputation  was  nothing  to 
me,  and  what  Paramore  knew  or  didn't  know  was 
in  my  eyes  unspeakably  unimportant.  I  wish  it 
clearly  understood,  you  see,  that  if  Paramore  de 
liberately  confused  exogamy  and  endogamy  in  the 
Australian  bush,  it  doesn't  in  the  least  matter  to 
me.  Paramore  is  only  a  symbol.  As  a  symbol,  I 
am  compelled  to  feel  him  important.  That  is  why 
I  wish  that  his  name  were  ringing  in  the  ears  and 
vibrating  on  the  lips  of  all  of  you.  His  bad  anthro 
pology  doesn't  matter — a  dozen  big  people  are  de 
lightedly  setting  that  straight — but  the  adventure 
of  his  soul  immensely  does.  Rightly  read,  it's  as 
27o 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

sound  as  a  homily  and  as  dramatic  as  Euripides. 
The  commonest  field  may  be  chosen  by  opposing 
generals  to  be  decisive;  and  in  a  day  history  is 
born  where  before  only  the  quiet  wheat  has  sprung. 
Paramore  is  like  that.  The  hostile  forces  converged 
by  chance  upon  his  breast. 

I  have  implied  that  Paramore  was  never  con 
spicuous.  That  is  to  be  more  merciful  than  just. 
The  general  public  cares  no  more,  I  suppose,  than 
I  do  about  the  marriage  customs  of  Australian  ab 
origines.  But  nowadays  the  general  public  has  in 
pay,  as  it  were,  an  army  of  scientists  in  every  field. 
We  all  expect  to  be  told  in  our  daily  papers  of  their 
most  important  victories,  and  have  a  comfortable 
feeling  that  we,  as  the  age,  are  subsidizing  research. 
By  the  same  token,  if  they  deceive  us,  we — the  age 
— are  personally  injured  and  fall  to  "muck-raking." 
It  is  typical  that  no  one  had  been  much  interested 
in  Paramore  until  he  was  discredited,  and  that  then, 
quite  without  intelligible  documents,  we  all  began 
to  despise  him.  The  situation,  for  that  matter,  was 
not  without  elements  of  humor.  The  facts,  as  I  and 
the  general  public  knew  them,  were  these — before 
276 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

Hoyting,  with  his  damnable  inside  information,  came 
into  it. 

Paramore  sprang  one  day,  full-armed,  from  some 
special  academic  obscurity.  He  had  scraped  together 
enough  money  to  bury  himself  in  the  Australian 
bush  and  grapple  face  to  face  with  primitive  religion 
in  its  most  concrete  form.  Each  to  his  taste;  and 
I  dare  say  some  casual  newspaper  readers  wished 
him  godspeed.  There  followed  the  proper  interval  of 
time;  then  an  emaciated  Paramore  suddenly  emerg 
ing,  laden  with  note-books;  then  the  published  vol 
ume,  very  striking  and  revolutionary,  a  treasure- 
house  of  authentic  and  indecent  anecdote.  He  could 
write,  too,  which  was  part  of  his  evil  fate;  so  that  a 
great  many  people  read  him.  That,  however,  was 
not  Paramore's  fault.  His  heart,  I  believe,  was  in 
Great  Russell  Street,  where  the  Royal  Anthro 
pologists  have  power  to  accept  or  reject.  He  prob 
ably  wanted  the  alphabet  picturesquely  arranged 
after  his  name.  At  all  events,  he  got  it  in  large 
measure.  You  see,  his  evidence  completely  upset  a 
lot  of  hard-won  theories  about  mother-right  and 
group-marriage;  and  he  didn't  hesitate  to  contra- 
277 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

diet  the  very  greatest.  He  actually  made  a  few 
people  speak  lightly  of  The  Golden  Bough.  No 
scientist  had  ever  spent  so  long  at  primitive  man's 
very  hearth  as  Paramore  had.  It  was  a  tremendous 
achievement.  He  had  data  that  must  have  been 
more  dangerous  to  collect  than  the  official  conver 
sation  of  nihilists.  It  was  his  daring  that  won  him 
the  momentary  admiration  of  the  public  to  which 
exogamy  is  a  ludicrously  unimportant  noun.  Very 
soon,  of  course,  every  one  forgot. 

It  was  not  more  than  two  years  after  his  book 
was  printed  that  the  newspapers  took  him  up 
again.  Most  of  them  appended  to  the  despatch  a 
brief  biography  of  Paramore.  No  biographies  were 
needed  in  Great  Russell  Street.  This  was  the  point 
where  the  comic  spirit  decided  to  meddle.  A  few 
Germans  had  always  been  protesting  at  inconsis 
tencies  in  Paramore's  book,  and  no  one  had  paid 
any  attention  to  them.  There  is  always  a  learned 
German  protesting  somewhere.  The  general  atti 
tude  among  the  great  was :  any  one  may  challenge  or 
improve  Paramore's  conclusions — in  fact,  it's  going 
to  be  our  delightful  task  for  ten  years  to  get  more 
278 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

out  of  Paramore  than  he  can  get  out  of  himself — 
but  do  get  down  on  your  knees  before  the  immense 
amount  of  material  he  has  taken  the  almost  fatal 
trouble  to  collect  for  us.  No  other  European  was  in 
a  position  to  discredit  Paramore.  It  took  an  Aus 
tralian  planter  to  do  that.  Whitaker  was  his  quite 
accidentally  notorious  name.  The  comic  spirit 
pushed  him  on  a  North  German  Lloyder  at  Mel 
bourne,  to  spend  a  few  happy  months  in  London.  It 
was  perfectly  natural  that  people  who  talked  to 
him  at  all  should  mention  Paramore.  The  unnatural 
thing  was  that  he  knew  all  about  Paramore.  He 
didn't  tell  all  he  knew — as  I  learned  afterward — but 
he  told  at  least  enough  to  prove  that  Paramore 
hadn't  spent  so  much  time  in  the  bush  as  would 
have  been  absolutely  necessary  to  compile  one- 
quarter  of  his  note-books.  Whitaker  was  sufficiently 
reticent  about  what  Paramore  had  been  doing 
most  of  the  time;  but  he  knew  for  a  fact,  and 
took  a  sporting  interest  in  proving  it,  that  Para 
more  had  never  been  west  of  the  Musgrave  Range. 
That  in  itself  sufficed  to  ruin  Paramore.  It  was  per 
fectly  easy,  then,  for  the  little  chorus  from  Bonn, 
279 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

Heidelberg,  etc.,  to  prove  in  their  meticulous  way 
that  both  his  cribbing  and  lying  (his  whole  treat 
ment  of  Spencer  and  Gillen  was  positively  artistic) 
had  all  been  mere  dust-throwing.  Of  course,  what 
Paramore  really  had  achieved  ceased  from  that  mo 
ment  to  count.  He  had  blasphemed;  and  the  holy 
inquisition  of  science  would  do  the  rest.  It  all  took 
a  certain  amount  of  time,  but  that  was  the  net  re 
sult. 

Paramore  made  no  defence,  oddly  enough.  Some 
kind  people  arranged  an  accidental  encounter  be 
tween  him  and  Whi  taker.  The  comic  spirit  was 
hostess,  and  the  newspapers  described  it.  It  gave 
the  cartoonists  a  happy  week.  Then  an  international 
complication  intervened,  and  the  next  thing  the 
newspapers  found  time  to  say  about  him  was  that 
he  had  gone  to  the  Upper  Niger,  still  on  folk-lore 
bent.  That  fact  would  have  been  stupendous  if  it 
hadn't  been  so  unimportant.  Two  years  later,  the 
fickle  press  returned  to  him  just  long  enough  to  say 
that  he  had  died.  I  certainly  thought  then  that  we 
had  heard  the  last  of  him.  But  the  comic  spirit  had 
laid  her  inexorable  finger  on  Hoyting.  And  suddenly, 
280 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

as  if  in  retribution  for  my  spasmodic  interest  in 
Paramore's  beautiful  fraud,  Hoyting  sent  for  me. 

I  went  to  one  of  the  rue  de  Rivoli  hotels  and 
met  him  by  appointment.  Of  course,  he  hadn't  told 
me  what  it  was  about.  Hoyting  never  writes;  and 
he  puts  as  little  into  a  telegram  as  a  frugal  old  maid. 
Any  sign  from  Hoyting,  however,  would  have  suf 
ficed  to  bring  me  to  Paris;  and  I  stayed  in  my 
hotel,  never  budging  even  for  the  Salon,  so  close  at 
hand,  until  Hoyting  appeared  in  my  sitting-room. 

I  asked  Hoyting  no  questions.  I  hadn't  an  idea 
of  what  he  wanted.  It  might,  given  Hoyting,  be 
anything.  He  began  without  preliminaries — except 
looking  frightfully  tired.  That,  for  Hoyting,  was  a 
rather  appalling  preliminary. 

"Three  months  ago  I  was  in  Dakar.  I  don't  know 
just  why  I  had  drifted  to  Senegal,  except  that  I've 
come  to  feel  that  if  there  must  be  colonial  govern 
ments  they  had  better  be  French.  If  there  was  any 
special  thing  that  pushed  me,  I've  forgotten  it. 

"They  were  decent ish  people,  those  French  offi 
cers  and  their  wives.  A  little  stiff  always,  never  ex 
patriated,  never  quite  at  ease  in  their  African  inn, 
281 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

but  not  half  so  likely  to  go  fantee  as  the  romantic 
Briton.  And  once  a  fortnight  the  little  boats  from 
Bordeaux  would  come  in,  bringing  more  of  them. 
I  rather  liked  them;  but,  even  so,  there  wasn't 
any  particular  reason  for  my  staying  so  long  in 
Dakar.  I  hung  on  like  an  alarm  that  has  been  set. 
I  couldn't  go  off — or  on — until  the  moment  I  was 
set  for.  I  don't  suppose  the  alarm-clock  knows  until 
the  vibration  begins  within  it.  Something  kept  me 
there  in  that  dull,  glaring,  little  official  town,  with 
its  dry  dock  and  torpedo  basin,  which,  of  course, 
they  had  managed  to  endow  with  the  flavor  of  pro 
vincial  France.  They  do  that  everywhere — you'll 
have  noticed? 

"I  used  to  go  up  sometimes  in  the  comparative 
cool  of  the  evening  to  dine  with  the  Fathers.  It  isn't 
that  I  hold  with  them  much — Rome  was  introduced 
to  me  in  my  childhood  as  the  Scarlet  Woman — but 
all  travellers  have  the  same  tale  to  tell.  They  are 
incomparable  missionaries.  And  it  stands  to  reason 
that  they  can  get  on  better  with  savages  than  the 
rest  of  you.  You  can  meet  magic  only  with  magic. 
It  was  they  who  introduced  me  to  Paramore." 
282 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

"Oh,  it's  Paramore!"  I  exclaimed.  "Heaven  for 
give  you,  Hoyting,  you  are  always  in  at  the  death. 
How  do  you  manage  it?  But  fancy  being  in  at  Para- 
more's!  By  the  way,  I  suppose  you  know  that  no 
one  knows  anything  except  that  he's  dead." 

"Umph!  Well,  I  do,"  returned  Hoyting.  "That's 
what  I  was  set  for — like  the  clock:  to  turn  up  at 
the  Mission  House  just  when  he  was  brought  in 
there  with  fever.  I  don't  go  hunting  for  things  like 
that,  you  understand.  I'd  as  soon  have  thought  of 
staying  on  for  Madame  Pothier's  beaux  yeux." 

"I  didn't  know  you  knew  whether  eyes  were  fine 
or  not." 

"I  suppose  I  don't.  But  I  can  guess.  There  are 
always  other  people  to  tell  you.  Anyhow,  her  fine 
eyes  were  all  for  le  bon  Dieu  and  Pothier.  She  was 
a  good  sort — married  out  of  a  little  provincial  con 
vent-school  to  a  man  twice  her  age,  and  taking  ship 
within  a  month  for  Senegal.  She  loved  him — for  his 
scars,  probably,  Desdemona-fashion.  Have  you  ever 
noticed  that  a  woman  often  likes  a  man  better  for 
a  crooked  white  seam  across  his  face  that  spoils  all 
the  modelling?  Naive  notions  women  have  about 
283 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

war!  They  tiptoe  round  the  carnage,  making  eyes 
at  the  slayers.  Oh,  in  imagination,  of  course.  And 
if  they  once  appreciate  how  they  really  feel  about 
it,  they  begin  to  gabble  about  disarmament." 

Hoyting  fingered  the  dingy  little  packet  that  he 
had  taken  out  of  his  pocket  and  laid  on  my  table. 
He  looked  far  away  out  of  the  window  for  a  moment, 
narrowing  his  eyes  as  if  trying  to  focus  them  on  an 
other  hemisphere. 

"So  he  was  taken  to  the  Pothiers'." 

"You're  leaving  out  a  lot,"  I  interrupted.  "Why 
'so,'  and  why  to  the  Pothiers?  You  said  to  the  Mis 
sion." 

"Oh"—  His  brows  knitted.  He  didn't  like  filling 
up  his  own  gaps.  The  things  Hoyting  takes  it  for 
granted  one  will  know  about  his  exotic  context! 
"The  Mission  was  full  of  patients — an  epidemic  had 
been  running  through  the  converts,  and  it  was  up 
to  them  to  prove  that  the  sacrament  of  baptism 
wasn't  some  deadly  process  of  inoculation.  As  I  say, 
it's  all  magic,  white  or  black.  Poor  Paramore  wasn't 
a  convert — he  was  by  way  of  being  an  agnostic,  I 
imagine— and  the  Fathers  weren't,  in  a  sense,  re 
sponsible  for  him.  Yet  one  must  do  them  the  jus- 
284 


THE    CASE    OF   PARAMORE 

tice  to  say  that  they'd  never  have  sent  him  away  if 
they  hadn't  had  a  better  place  to  send  him  to.  The 
Mission  was  no  place  at  the  moment  for  a  man 
with  fever — sweating  infection  as  it  was,  and  full  of 
frightened  patients  who  were  hiding  gri-gris  under 
their  armpits  and  looking  more  than  askance  at  the 
crucifixes  over  the  doors.  The  Pothiers  had  known 
Paramore  two  years  before,  when  he  had  stopped 
in  Dakar  on  his  way  into  the  interior.  They  took  him 
in  quite  naturally  and  simply.  Paramore  had  noticed 
her  fine  eyes,  I  believe — oh,  in  all  honor  and  loyalty. 
There  were  lots  of  ways  in  which  he  wasn't  a  rotter. 
He  was  merely  the  finest  liar  in  the  world — and  a 
bit  of  a  Puritan  to  boot. 

"Is  there  any  combination  life  hasn't  exhausted, 
I  wonder?"  Hoyting  walked  to  the  window,  his 
hands  in  his  pockets,  looking  down  at  the  eternal 
race  of  the  taxicabs  below.  "Think  of  what  may  be 
going  by  in  any  one  of  those  taxis.  And  Paramore 
was  a  bit  of  a  Puritan,  for  all  his  years  of  fake  an 
thropology." 

His  face  was  heavily  weary  as  presently  he  turned 
it  to  me. 

"I  was  involved  in  Paramore's  case.  I've  been  to 
285 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

the  bottom  of  this  thing,  I  tell  you.  Paramore  over 
flowed — emptied  himself  like  a  well;  and  at  the  end 
there  was  absolutely  nothing  left  in  his  mind;  it 
was  void,  up  to  the  black  brim.  Then  he  died — quite 
vacuous.  He  had  simply  poured  out  his  inner  life 
around  me.  I  was  left  alone  in  Dakar,  swimming  in 
the  infernal  pool  of  Parainore's  cerebrations.  You 
can't,  on  the  banks  of  the  Senegal,  refer  a  man  to 
his  solicitors.  If  Paramore  had  been  a  Catholic,  I 
could  have  turned  his  case  over  to  the  Bishop.  But 
bishops  had  nothing  to  do  with  Paramore.  And 
that's  where  you  come  in." 

"Oh,  I  come  in,  do  I?"  I  asked  a  little  fearfully. 
No  one  wants  to  come  in  where  Hoyting  leaves  off. 

"Of  course.  Why  else  did  I  make  an  appoint 
ment  with  you?  You'll  take  this  packet  when  you 
leave.  You  don't  suppose  I'm  going  to  London!" 

"I  didn't  know  Paramore." 

"No;  but  I  did.  And  when  I've  told  you,  you'll 
see.  I  don't  take  a  trip  like  this  for  nothing.  I  hate 
the  very  smell  of  the  asphalt." 

"Go  on."  It's  what  one  always  says  to  Hoyting. 

"I  can't  tell  it  coherently — though  I  can  tell  it, 
286 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

I  suppose,  more  coherently  than  he  did.  In  the  first 
place,  what  do  you  know  about  him?'* 

The  question  sent  a  flood  of  dingy  reminiscence 
welling  slowly  and  muddily  up  through  my  conscious 
ness.  I  thought  for  a  moment.  What,  after  all,  was 
there  to  tell  about  Paramore  except  that  he  had 
lied,  and  that  in  the  end  he  had  been  discredited  as 
lavishly  as  for  a  time  he  had  been  believed?  For  any 
one  else  I  might  have  made  a  sprightly  little  story 
out  of  the  elliptical  narrative  of  the  newspapers; 
but  no  one  that  I  know  of  has  ever  tried  to  be  a 
raconteur  for  Hoyting.  He  has  use  only  for  the  raw 
material;  art  disgusts  him.  I  gave  him  as  rapid  a 
precis  as  I  could,  suppressing  all  instinct  to  em 
broider  it. 

When  I  had  finished:  "He's  completely  discred 
ited,  then?" 

I  waved  my  hands.  "My  dear  Hoyting,  no  one 
would  take  Paramore's  word  about  the  manners 
and  customs  of  his  own  household." 

"It's  a  pity,"  said  Hoyting  simply.  "It  makes  it 
harder  for  you." 

"I've  nothing  to  do  with  Paramore.  If  there's 
287 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

one  thing  that  interests  me  less  than  his  disaster, 
it's  his  rehabilitation."  I  didn't  mean  to  be  flippant, 
but  Hoyting's  ominousness  invited  it. 

"Oh,  rehabilitation — no;  I  dare  say,  between  us, 
we  couldn't  manage  that.  I  merely  want  to  get  the 
truth  off  my  hands." 

Hoyting  lighted  another  cigarette.  The  atmos 
phere  of  my  room  was  already  densely  blue,  and  I 
opened  the  window.  His  hand  shot  up.  "Shut  that, 
please.  I  can't  be  interrupted  by  all  those  savage 
noises.  God!  for  a  breath  of  sea  air!" 

I  sat  down  and  faced  him.  After  all,  the  man  has 
never  lived  who  could  stage-manage  Hoyting. 

"Did  you  ever  meet  the  Australian?"  he  asked. 

"Whitaker?  No." 

"A  pretty  bad  lot,  I  gather." 

"Do  you  mean  that  he  lied?" 

"  Oh,  no.  From  what  Paramore  said,  I  should  think 
that  was  just  the  one  thing  he  didn't  do." 

Hoyting  dropped  his  chin  on  his  breast  and  nar 
rowed  his  eyes.  Then  he  shook  his  head  very  slowly. 
"At  my  time  of  life  it's  silly  to  be  always  saying 
how  strange  things  are,  and  how  clever  life  is,  and 
288 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

all  that  literary  nonsense;  but,  on  my  word,  if  ever 
a  scene  was  arranged  to  make  a  man  a  protagonist 
in  spite  of  himself,  this  was  it.  Every  element  in  that 
Dakar  situation  was  contrived  to  bring  Paramore 
out.  He  had  fever  and  the  prescience  of  death — 
which  is  often  mistaken,  but  works  just  as  well  not 
withstanding;  he  had  performed  his  extraordinary 
task;  he  was  in  love  with  Madame  Pothier.  The  cup 
was  spilling  over,  and  I  was  there  to  wipe  up  the 
overflow." 

Hoyting  was  silent  for  a  moment.  Then  he  spoke 
irritably. 

"I  don't  know  where  to  begin.  There  isn't  any 
beginning  to  this  story.  It  hasn't  any  climax — or 
else  it's  all  climax.  It's  just  a  mess.  Well,  I  shall 
have  to  begin,  I  suppose,  if  Paramore  didn't.  Per 
haps  the  first  thing  was  his  sitting  up  in  bed 
one  morning  and  peering  out  at  me  through  his 
mosquito-netting.  It  gave  him  a  queer,  caged  look. 
His  voice  went  with  it — that  cracked  and  throaty 
voice  they  have,  you  know.  'Do  you  know  Whit- 
aker?'  he  asked. 

"'No,  indeed,'  I  said.  ' You'd  better  lie  down/ 
289 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

"If  you  could  have  seen  him  then,  you'd  have 
felt,  as  I  did,  that  he'd  better  not  talk;  that  he 
wouldn't  say  anything  one  wanted  to  hear. 

"'It  was  Whitaker  that  finished  me.'  Still  he 
peered  out  at  me. 

"'You're  not  finished.'  I  remember  lying  quite 
peevishly  about  it.  He  so  obviously  was  finished. 

"'Yes,  I  am.  And  Whitaker  did  it.  Oh,  I  mean  I 
really  did  it.' 

"  I  give  you  my  word  that  he  was  startling,  with 
that  unnatural  voice,  that  cunning  look  in  his  eyes 
the  sick  often  get,  and  those  little  white  cross-bars 
pressed  against  his  face. 

" '  Lie  down,'  I  said  again. '  What  did  Whitaker  do? ' 

"  He  shook  his  head  a  little,  and  the  netting  moved 
on  his  face.  It  was  horrid. 

"'He  told  them  I  couldn't  have  done  the  stuff  I'd 
brought  back.' 

"'Did  he  know?' 

"'He  didn't  know  anything  about  folk-lore,  but 
he  did  know  where  I'd  been.' 

"He  spoke  so  impersonally  that  it  led  me  on  to  ask 
questions.  After  all,  I  had  told  Madame  Pothier  I 

290 


THE    CASE    OF    PA  RAM  ORE 

would  stay  with  him  through  the  morning,  and  I  had 
to  make  the  time  go  somehow  for  both  of  us.  It  was 
remittent  fever  without  the  chills,  and  there  were 
fairish  mornings  at  first.  The  afternoons  and  nights, 
when  the  malady  rose  like  a  wave  and  broke  horribly 
after  midnight — oh,  those  were  bad.  Madame  Po- 
thier  and  the  regimental  doctor  took  care  of  those. 
It  looked  fairly  hopeful  when  he  arrived,  but  finally 
all  the  worst  symptoms  came  out,  and  before  the  end 
it  was  very  bad.  It  was  one  of  those  cases  that  might, 
at  the  last,  be  yellow  fever  and  just  technically  isn't. 
Poor  Paramore !  Did  I  say  that  his  face  looked  as  old 
as  all  time  under  that  shock  of  sun-bleached  hair?  It 
did. 

"That  questioning  was  the  first  of  it.  It  fixed  the 
name  of  Whitaker  in  my  mind.  I  thought  I'd  find 
out  something  about  him.  You  never  can  tell  what 
will  comfort  a  man  in  that  state.  But  the  Pothiers 
had  never  heard  of  him,  or  the  Fathers  at  the  Mission. 
I  only  mention  those  first  remarks  of  Paramore's  to 
show  you  how  I  came  into  it.  I  had  never  heard  of 
Paramore  himself  until  that  time  in  Dakar.  I  never 
read  newspapers.  All  those  good  people  said  Para- 
291 


THE   CASE   OF   PARAMORE 

more  was  a  *  grand  savant,'  but  they  seemed  a  lit 
tle  vague,  themselves.  The  only  person  who  wasn't 
vague  was  a  lean,  old,  parchment-colored  Father  who 
was  waiting  for  the  next  boat  to  take  him  home. 
He  had  been  twenty  years  in  the  interior,  and  he  was 
worn  out — all  except  his  voice,  which  was  startlingly 
deep.  He  said  no  one  could  afford  to  study  fetich  but 
a  priest.  Pere  Bernard  had  no  respect  for  anthro 
pologists — thought  they  took  a  collector's  interest  in 
preserving  various  primeval  forms  of  sin,  I  suppose. 
I  didn't  care  for  his  mediaeval  manners,  and  I  went 
back  to  Paramore  with  more  sympathy.  What  a 
world!  I  always  wondered  if  Paramore  had  some 
time,  somewhere  at  the  back  of  beyond,  got  him  on 
the  raw.  Well,  we  shall  never  know.  And  yet  I  dare 
say  the  reverend  old  gentleman  is  here  in  Paris  at 
this  very  moment.  What  a  world!  Nothing  in  it,  ac 
cording  to  Pere  Bernard,  that  isn't  magic — either 
white  or  black. 

"I  can't  tell  you  by  what  steps  Paramore  led  me 
to  his  tragedy.  I  don't  remember  those  days  sepa 
rately  at  all.  They  went  in  jagged  ups  and  downs — 
times  jwhen  he  talked,  times  when  he  was  dumb, 
292 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

times  when  he  might  be  said  to  rave.  Then,  too,  he 
brought  things  out  in  no  order  at  all.  It  was  as  if  he 
lay  in  a  world  beyond  perspective  and  expected  you 
to  sit  outside  of  Space  and  Time,  too,  and  see  it  all 
whole,  as  he  did.  That  was  rather  unpleasant — he 
had  so  the  manner  of  being  dead  and  seeing  his  life 
from  so  far  off  that  one  thing  in  it  was  as  near  and 
as  real  as  another.  There  was  absolutely  no  selection. 
It  was  only  by  recurrence  of  certain  things  that  you 
got  any  stress.  And  out  of  it  all  I  managed  to  get  the 
three  main  facts:  the  Royal  Anthropological  Insti 
tute,  Whi  taker,  and  the  soul  of  Paramore.  Madame 
Pothier  was  a  close  fourth,  but  she  was  only  an  ac 
cessory  after  the  fact.  That  I  swear.  You  believe  it?" 

I  jerked  my  head  up.  "Good  Heavens,  Hoyting, 
how  do  I  know?  You  haven't  told  me  anything  yet." 

He  rubbed  his  hands  over  his  brows  and  frowned 
with  closed  eyes.  "No;  I  beg  your  pardon.  But,  as  I 
say,  I  see  the  whole  thing.  It's  hard  to  tell.  It  never 
was  told  to  me.  And  I  didn't  want  you  to  think  it 
was  one  of  those  silly  tales  of  a  man's  turning  hero 
because  he's  in  love  with  a  woman.  If  Paramore  had 
asked  me  to  tell  Madame  Pothier  the  story  I'm  tell- 
293 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

ing  you,  I'd  have  turned  on  my  heel  and  left  him,  if 
he'd  been  at  the  death  gasp.  I  swear  I  would." 

Hoyting  lighted  another  cigarette — the  world's 
supply  must  be  inexhaustible ! — and  seemed  to  brace 
his  huge  body  for  concentrated  effort. 

"Well,  here  it  is.  Paramore  had  one  passion  in 
life — one  double-distilled,  quintessentially  pure  pas 
sion — and  that  passion  was  anthropology.  There 
never  was  a  stiffer,  straighter,  more  Puritanical  de 
votion  to  an  idea  than  his.  Get  that  into  your  head 
first,  if  you  want  to  understand." 

I  could  be  forgiven,  it  strikes  me,  for  being  scepti 
cal,  in  the  light  of  that  neat  precis  I  had  compiled 
from  the  newspapers.  "Oh,  come,  Hoyting,"  I  said, 
"science  doesn't  recruit  from  liars — not  even  when 
they've  got  Paramore's  deuced  cheek.  You  are  up 
set." 

One  look  at  Hoyting's  gigantic  lassitude  put  me  in 
the  wrong.  It  would  take  more  than  Paramore  to 
upset  Hoyting.  He  was  perfectly  firm,  though  very 
much  bored.  Imagine  neurasthenia  and  Hoyting 
bunking  together!  One  can't.  Hoyting  smiled. 

"No,  it's  not  nerves.  Only  you  people  who  want 
294 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

everything  all  of  a  piece — you  irritate  me.  The  point 
about  Paramore  is  that  he  combined  contradictions. 
He  was  magnificently  human.  And  as  I  am  in  pos 
session  of  facts,  I  ask  you  to  suspend  your  silly 
judgment  until  I've  done.  If  you  know  anything 
about  me,  you  know  that  I  don't  go  in  for  theo 
ries." 

I  was  silent. 

"It  was  the  only  thing  he  cared  about,  I  tell  you. 
Nature  implants  something  in  every  man  that  kills 
him  in  the  end.  Paramore  wanted  recognition  from 
a  very  small,  almost  undiscernible,  group  of  people 
whom  neither  you  nor  I  nor  any  one  else  gives  a 
damn  for — a  few  old  gentlemen  in  frock  coats  and 
gold  eye-glasses  who  raise  their  poor,  thin  old  eye 
brows  over  the  sins  of  Paris,  but  feel  a  tremulous 
pleasure  in  the  nastiness  of  Melanesia.  Why  did  he? 
Just  because  he  believed  they  are  a  sacred  sect.  He 
honestly  believed  that  anthropology  was  important. 
He  thought  it  was  big  and  real  and  vital  and  solemn. 
He  had  supreme  respect  for  facts.  He  put  every  penny 
he  had  or  ever  hoped  to  have  into  going  out  to  ac 
quire  them  in  the  bush.  The  bush  isn't  nice.  The 
295 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

climate  distressed  him,  the  natives  shocked  him,  the 
solitudes  terrified  him.  Why  did  he  go?  Because 
he  held,  quite  austerely,  the  scientific  attitude  to 
wards  data,  evidence,  material.  Those  old  gentlemen 
needed  more  facts  to  feed  their  theories  with,  and 
Paramore  was  the  boy  to  get  them.  When  there's 
neither  health  nor  wealth  nor  pleasure  to  be  got 
from  doing  a  thing,  a  man  doesn't  do  it  except  for 
an  idea." 

"Fame?"  I  suggested. 

"Fame?  Well,  even  if  Paramore  had  told  the 
truth,  he  wouldn't  have  had  any  fame  that  you'd 
notice.  It  was  just  a  pathetic  belief  in  the  sanctity 
of  those  few  old  gentlemen  who  potter  round  among 
unclean  visions  of  primitive  man.  They  can't,  in  the 
nature  of  the  case,  be  very  numerous.  If  you  want 
fame,  you  go  for  the  crowd.  He  could  have  done  a  lit 
tle  fancy  exploring  if  he'd  wanted  fame.  No!  Para 
more  had  the  superstition." 

"What  really  happened  in  Australia?" 

"The  only  interesting  thing  happened  inside  Para- 
more.  He  decided  to  lie." 

"He  must  have  been  a  bit  of  a  coward.  If  he 
296 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

wanted  so  desperately  to  collect  those  filthy  facts, 
why  didn't  he  collect  them?  " 

"Bad  luck — nothing  else.  He  went  as  far  as  he 
could.  But  he  was  no  seasoned  traveller,  you  know. 
He  just  came  to  grief,  as  any  man  might,  there  in  the 
wilderness.  The  stars  in  their  courses — and  so  forth. 
He  didn't  get  so  far  west  as  he  had  meant  to.  Men 
went  back  on  him,  maps  turned  out  incorrect,  sup 
plies  failed  awkwardly,  everything  happened  that  can 
happen.  Then  his  interpreter  died — his  one  abso 
lutely  trustworthy  man — and  the  whole  game  was 
up.  He  lost  his  head;  he  believed  his  eyes;  he  believed 
lying  natives.  They  made  game  of  him,  I  dare  say, 
in  some  grim,  neolithic  way.  They  said  anything  and 
everything  about  marriage  customs — quite  different 
things  from  group  to  group.  He  had  bad  luck  with 
his  own  men — half  a  dozen  of  them  died  of  dysentery 
or  something — and  he  had  to  recruit  on  the  spot. 
Why  on  earth  should  they  tell  him  the  truth?  It  was 
more  fun  not  to.  And,  of  course,  now  and  then  he 
pushed  into  some  corner  where  the  only  use  they  had 
for  him  was  to  eat  him.  From  those  places  he  had  to 
withdraw  speedily.  It's  not  an  anthropologist's  busi- 
297 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

ness  to  get  killed  unless  he  can  be  sure  of  getting  his 
note-books  home.  He's  more  like  a  spy,  apparently, 
than  a  soldier. 

"After  eight  or  ten  beastly  months,  despair  was 
reeking  round  him  like  a  mist.  I  think  he  said  that, 
himself.  His  mind  tried  to  peer  out  through  it.  He 
got  nothing  but  a  jumble  of  reports  from  those 
aborigines.  Time  after  time  they'd  promise  to  let 
him  in  on  some  rite,  and  then  their  faces  would  be 
shamelessly  blank  when  he  kept  his  appointment. 
They  said  nothing  that  wasn't  carefully  contra 
dicted.  Certain  things  he  did  get  hold  of,  of  course. 
Paramore  swore  to  me  that  a  good  bit  of  his  book 
was  true  as  truth — but  not  enough  to  prove  any 
thing,  to  found  theories  on.  About  three  of  the  note 
books  were  genuine,  but  they  made  nothing  co 
herent,  he  said.  He  put  everything  down,  always 
intending  to  check  and  sift  later." 

I  may  have  looked  a  little  bored,  for  Hoyting  sud 
denly  interrupted  his  narrative.  "I'm  telling  you  all 
this,"  he  said,  "because  it's  essential  that  you  should 
know  everything  you  can  know  about  it.  The  thing's 
going  to  be  in  your  hands,  and  the  more  information 
298 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

you  have  the  better..  I'm  not  dragging  you  through 
this  biography  because  I  think  it's  beautiful.  I  can 
see  you  loathe  it  all.  Well  ...  if  only  you  stay-at- 
home  people  would  realize  how  much  luck  counts! 
You  don't  dream  of  the  mad  dance  of  incalculable 
forces.  What  you  really  hate  Paramore  for  is  his 
having  luck  against  him." 

"No,"  I  protested  stiffly;  "for  lying." 

"If  he  had  had  luck,  he  wouldn't  have  lied.  He 
would  have  been  prettier  if  he  had  been  incapable 
of  lying;  but  if  he  hadn't  needed  to  lie,  you  never 
would  have  known  that  he  wasn't  as  pretty  as  any 
one  else.  You're  quite  right,  of  course.  I'm  not  ask 
ing  you  to  love  Paramore,  but  I  advise  you  to  under 
stand  him  as  well  as  you  can.  You'll  find  the  whole 
business  easier." 

"Say  what  you  have  made  up  your  mind  to  say." 
I  couldn't,  at  the  moment,  go  further  than  that. 

Hoyting  swung  back,  as  if  there  had  been  no  in 
terruption,  as  if  I  had  been  pleading  with  him  not  to 
stop. 

"One  day,  when  the  despair  was  thickest,  he  had 
an  idea.  He  may  have  been  a  little  off  his  head,  you 
299 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

know.  .  .  .  He  wouldn't  confess  his  failure  at  all.  He 
would  let  his  imagination  play  over  those  note 
books;  he  would  supply  from  his  generous  brain  ev 
erything  that  was  needed.  A  good  deal  of  it  was  new 
country,  quite  aboriginal  and  nasty,  and  his  learn 
ing  was  sufficient  to  warn  him  off  ground  that  had 
been  authentically  covered.  It  was  also  sufficient  to 
keep  him  magnificently  plausible.  He  would  take  his 
meagre  gleanings  to  some  secluded  spot,  and  he 
would  return  to  England  with  the  completed  sheaf. 
He  would  squeeze  the  last  drop  of  significance  out  of 
every  detail  he  had  learned;  and  if  he  were  put  to  it, 
he  would  invent.  'No,  not  invent,  exactly,*  he  cor 
rected  himself  when  he  told  me.  '  I  would  draw  con 
clusions  and  parallels;  I  would  state  probabilities  as 
facts;  and  I  would  put  in  some — a  very  few — of  the 
things  I  suspected  but  had  no  proof  of.  And  then  I 
would  contradict  a  few  things/ 

"Those  were  his  words,  describing  that  ancient 
intention  of  his.  'My  pen  got  away  with  me,'  he 
confessed;  'and  the  lust  of  making  a  beautiful  book. 
There  were  things  that  occurred  to  me — I  put  them 
in.  Any  one  who  knows  any  folk-lore  can  make  up 
300 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

customs  with  his  eyes  shut.  After  a  little,  you  get  to 
feel  that  if  the  beastly  creatures  didn't  do  it  that  way 
they  must  be  awful  fools.  And  then  you  get  to  believe 
that  they  did.  But  I  marked  everything  on  the  mar 
gin  of  my  own  manuscript  as  I  wrote  it,  true  or  not 
true,  inferred  or  just  invented.  That  was  later — 
much  later — at  Whi taker's  place.' 

"I  give  you  some  jof  his  words  that  I  remember, 
you  see.  I  don't  remember  much.  But  that  was  the 
gist  of  his  great  confession.  He  had  the  idea — his  one 
way  to  snap  his  fingers  at  luck.  Until  he  got  into  the 
work,  he  didn't  know  how  his  idea  would  dominate 
him.  He  first  had  the  notion  of  putting  just  enough 
alloy  into  his  book  to  give  it  body.  In  the  end  his 
idea  rode  him — and  damned  him.  I'm  leaving  out  a 
lot,  but  you  can  work  that  out  for  yourself — how  his 
inspiration  would  have  come,  and  what  would  have 
happened." 

"But  what  about  his  scientific  passion?  That  has 
nothing  to  do  with  the  'lust  of  making  a  beautiful 
book' — quite  the  contrary." 

"Wait  till  I've  finished.  Now  comes  Eve.  Place  aux 
dames  /  .  .  . 

301 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

"Before  he  had  struck  out  into  the  fatal  west  for 
himself,  he  had  stopped  with  a  planter.  The  planter's 
name,  of  course,  was  Whitaker.  There  was  a  man 
who  had  isolated  himself,  and  worked  like  a  navvy, 
and  made  good.  His  history,  I  suppose,  was  much  like 
all  other  local  histories.  His  place,  on  one  of  the 
rivers  that  flow  into  Lake  Eyre,  was  a  kind  of  out 
post.  He  was  very  glad  to  let  Paramore  sit  on  his 
verandah  and  talk  to  him  in  the  evenings.  Paramore 
must  have  been  there  six  weeks  before  he  finally 
started  on  his  expedition — if  you  can  call  an  unsuc 
cessful,  hand-made  thing  that  leaked  at  every  pore 
an  expedition.  The  daughter,  Joan  Whitaker,  was 
back  from  school  in  Melbourne.  There  was  a  fiance 
of  sorts  about  the  place.  I  don't  remember  much 
about  him,  least  of  all  his  name.  He  was  approved  by 
Whitaker.  Paramore  seems  not  to  have  noticed  the 
girl — rather  deliberately  not  to  have  noticed  her,  she 
being  another  man's  property.  So  Whitaker  had  no 
objection  to  prolonging  Paramore's  stay.  Paramore 
talked,  I  feel  convinced,  as  well  as  he  wrote.  I  saw  of 
him  only  dregs  and  delirium,  but  I  made  that  out. 
The  love  affair  went  on  all  over  the  plantation,  while 
302 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

Whitaker  and  Paramore  sat  on  the  verandah  and  con 
stituted  society.  They  got  on  well  enough,  apparently. 
Paramore  certainly  liked  Joan  Whitaker,  but  he  kept 
out  of  the  way  of  the  fortunate  affair.  Remember 
that;  there's  no  reason  to  doubt  his  word.  It  all  came 
out,  bit  by  bit,  in  troubled  references — mixed  up 
with  his  symptoms  and  medicines,  and  the  ebb  and 
flow  of  the  fever. 

"But  out  in  the  bush,  later,  the  memory  of  her 
had  grown  upon  him;  I  suppose,  simply  because, 
though  so  far  away,  she  was  the  nearest  feminine 
thing.  At  the  heart  of  all  that  despair  over  the  frus 
trated  research,  was  an  irrelevant  sentimental  regret 
that  he  shouldn't  be  able  to  make  love  to  her  if  he 
ever  saw  her  again.  In  her  Sittings  about,  she  had 
pricked  his  imagination  once  or  twice — this  bright 
creature  that  flitted  at  another  man's  behest.  You 
can  see  how  it  might  be;  and  Paramore  up  to  that 
time  had  been  heart-whole.  Moreover,  his  explora 
tion  was  shocking  and  disgusting  to  him,  as  I've 
said — it  was  aimless  nastiness  without  even  the  grace 
of  bolstering  up  a  theory.  He  didn't  love  the  work 

for  itself,  remember;  only  for  its  results  and  what  he 
303 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

believed  its  sacred  importance.  He  hated  the  tech 
nique  of  it.  And  Joan  Whitaker  was  as  different  as  a 
Melbourne  schooling,  and  a  fair  complexion,  and  the 
awkwardness  of  innocence,  could  make  her.  She  was 
all  the  things  those  unsatisfactory  aborigines  weren't. 
I  don't  think  it  went  deeper  than  that.  She  merely 
served  the  moment.  Any  other  girl  would  have  done 
as  well.  Or,  at  least,  that's  my  notion. 

"Well — you  can  see  the  rest  from  here.  He  went 
back  with  his  big,  insane  idea,  leaving  despair  far 
ther  behind  him  at  every  step.  He  struck  straight 
back  again  to  Whitaker's  place,  and  after  nuisances 
and  delays  and  impossible  absurd  misadventures,  he 
got  there.  All  the  time,  he  carried  his  idea  carefully 
intact,  like  a  cup  filled  with  precious  liquid.  He  was 
most  anxious  to  get  to  some  place  where  he  could  sit 
down  with  pens  and  ink.  He  didn't  doubt  Whitaker 
would  take  him  in.  Everything  was  to  be  completed 
before  he  sailed  for  England.  The  story  would  have 
been  very  different,  I'm  inclined  to  think,  and  Para- 
more  might  have  been  living  to  this  day  if  the  fiance 
hadn't  turned  out  a  bad  lot  and  been  shipped — or 
if  Paramore  himself  hadn't  been  a  bit  of  a  Puritan. 
304 


THE    CASE    OF    PA  RAM  ORE 

"He  found  Whitaker  very  much  surprised  to  see 
him  back  so  long  before  the  date  he  had  set,  but 
only  too  glad  to  have  him  stay;  and  he  also  found  the 
girl,  no  longer  flitting  about,  but  brooding  on  the 
bough.  The  rest  was  inevitable.  .  .  . 

"Paramore  got  to  work  at  once — making  love  to 
Joan  Whitaker  in  the  intervals,  almost  from  the  be 
ginning.  Then — mark  the  .nature  of  the  man — he 
found  that  the  two  things  he  was  doing  were  incom 
patible.  There's  no  telling  whether  Joan  Whitaker 
would  have  objected  to  his  idea,  but  he  seems  to 
have  been  sure  that  she  would  if  she  knew.  His  idea 
rode  him — the  idea  of  getting  the  better  of  his  bad 
luck.  He  didn't  want  to  cheat  his  fellow  scientists, 
who  had  done  him  no  harm,  but  he  did  want  to  cheat 
his  mean  destiny.  He  personified  it  like  an  enemy,  I 
fancy.  It  must  have  been  an  obsession  with  him.  Day 
by  day,  he  saw  better  what  the  book — his  revenge — 
was  becoming;  and  in  the  end  there  was  no  mistaking 
it  for  a  monstrous,  magnificent  lie,  out  of  all  propor 
tion  to  what  he  had  first  intended.  Some  men  might 
have  managed  even  so — the  men  who  keep  life  in 
water-tight  compartments.  Not  Paramore.  He  didn't 
305 


THE    CASE   OF    PARAMORE 

see  his  way  to  offering  Joan  Whitaker  a  liar  for  a 
husband.  It  apparently  never  occurred  to  him  to  put 
the  case  before  her.  There  are  very  few  cases  you  can 
put  to  a  girl  of  eighteen.  And,  as  I've  said,  his  feeling 
for  her  was  all  reverence  and  illusion  and  reversion 
to  type.  Any  niceish  girl  would  have  done  the  trick 
for  him;  and  any  man  would  have  looked  eligible  to 
her  smarting  conceit.  But  it  was  no  marriage  of  true 
minds — just  an  affair  of  circumstance  and  of  innocent 
senses,  riotously  collaborating.  Madame  Pothier — a 
finished  creature — would  have  been  a  very  different 
matter.  But  he  had  never  seen  her  then.  .  .  . 

"Oh,  well;  you  see  how  it  went.  He  was  virtually 
staking  everything  on  that  book,  which  was  virtually 
writing  itself,  'like  a  damned  planchette,'  he  told 
me. "But  he  couldn't  let  her  stake  anything  on  it;  he 
couldn't  even  ,ask  her  to.  Moreover,  it  was  one  of 
those  inconvenient  situations  where  no  explanation 
except  the  right  one  is  of  the  slightest  use.  So  he 
packed  up  his  manuscript  and  left  for  some  address, 
that  he  didn't  give,  in  New  South  Wales." 

"Like  that?"  I  asked.  The  sudden  turns  of  the 
thing  were  beginning  to  interest  me,  in  spite  of  my 
Pharisaism. 

306 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMO  RE 

*  Oh,  there  were  alarums  and  excursions,  of  course. 
But  I  had  to  guess  them  myself.  Paramore's  mind 
had  other  things  to  dwell  on.  You  can  see  it  all, 
though:  the  girl,  who  had  thought  he  was  drifting 
towards  a  proposal;  the  man,  Whi taker,  who  wanted 
his  daughter  settled  and  happy,  and  thought  Para- 
more  would  do — oh,  a  lot  of  primitive  instincts  that 
we  don't  recognize  until  they're  baffled;  Paramore 
behaving  as  well  as  he  knew  how,  granted  his  obses 
sion;  and  they  choosing  to  consider  him  a  blackguard. 
Nothing  violent  happened,  apparently,  but  you  can 
understand  the  zest  with  which  Whitaker  probably 
spoke  in  London.  There  was  black  hate  in  his  truth- 
telling.  I  fancy  what  Paramore  had  done  wouldn't 
in  the  least  have  shocked  Whitaker  if  it  had  been 
done  by  his  son-in-law.  He  didn't  mention  the  girl 
in  that  famous  interview,  and  Paramore  never  knew 
what  had  become  of  her.  I  don't  think  he  cared.  He 
never  saw  Whitaker  again." 

Hoyting  rose  and  walked  to  the  window.  The  gray 
eyes  looked  curiously  down  on  the  rue  de  Rivoli,  as 
if,  for  charity,  he  had  taken  a  box  at  a  pageant  that 
bored  him. 

"This  isn't  in  my  line,  you  know,"  he  said  finally, 
307 


THE    CASE    OF   PARAMORE 

turning  back — "any  of  it.  Paramore  reeked  of  civili 
zation — Great  Russell  Street,  if  you  like.  Hang  civ- 
lization!  Yet  he  went  down  with  fever  like  a  sick 
Kruboy.  Well,  I  must  get  on  with  this.  I  wouldn't 
stop  in  Paris  another  night  for  anything  you  could 
offer  me." 

He  sat  down,  his  big  frame  shaking  the  little  gilded 
armchair.  But  he  seemed  loath  to  begin.  His  gray 
eyes  were  closed. 

"How  did  he  get  to  Dakar?" 

Hoyting's  eyes  were  still  closed  as  he  answered. 
"That  was  Paramore  trying  to  wash  himself  white 
again.  He  was  discredited,  deservedly.  He  had  lied, 
deliberately  and  rather  long-windedly.  No  loophole 
anywhere  for  excuse.  Paramore  himself  was  the  last 
man  to  find  any  excuse  for  it.  He  never  carried  a 
devil's  advocate  about  with  him.  Doubtless,  at 
home,  his  own  conscience  had  returned  to  him,  in 
place  of  the  changeling  conscience  that  had  dwelt 
with  him  in  the  wilderness.  He  knew  his  reputation 
was  dead  and  buried  with  a  stake  through  its  heart. 
But  he  set  himself  to  atone.  Some  men,  feeling  as  he 
did,  would  have  shaved  their  heads  and  put  on  a  hair 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

shirt.  Not  Paramore — though  he  would  have  saved 
me  a  lot  of  nuisance  if  he  had.  No;  he  wanted  to  re 
trieve  himself  in  kind,  as  you  might  say.  He  would 
spend  his  life  and  his  few  crumbling  bits  of  fortune 
in  doing  the  thing  he  had  pretended  to  do.  He  would 
go  to  an  utterly  new  field  and  stay  till  he'd  amassed  a 
treasure — priceless,  authentic  facts,  each  an  unflawed 
pearl.  That's  why  he  went  to  the  Upper  Niger — and 
here  is  his  treasure." 

Hoyting  opened  his  eyes  suddenly,  bent  forward, 
and  tossed  the  packet  across  to  me. 

"There  you  have  it  all.  He  went,  he  did  the  in 
credible  thing,  and  then,  quite  properly,  he  died. 
The  rest — the  rest  is  mere  drama."  He  sat  back. 

I  put  the  packet  down.  "  Do  you  mean  that  these 
are  his  documents,  and  that  you  believe  in  them? 
Have  you  read  them?" 

"Have  I  read  them?  Do  I  look  as  if  I  would 
read  an  anthropologist's  note-books?  Of  course,  I  can 
see  the  humor  of  throwing  over  Christianity,  lock, 
stock,  and  barrel,  only  to  spend  your  life  studying 
totemism — and  on  top  of  that,  calling  it  a  *  career.' 
If  you  think  the  absurdity  of  it  is  lost  on  me,  you're 
309 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

quite  mistaken.  But  I  would  be  willing  to  take  my 
oath  before  the  Last  Tribunal  that  there  isn't  a  false 
word  in  that  whole  pile.  Paramore  did  it — the  more 
honor  to  him.  When  it  comes  to  expecting  any  one 
else  to  believe  it — I'm  not  such  a  fool.  But  I  should 
think  my  word  might  suffice  for  you." 
I  shrugged  my  shoulders. 

Hoyting  lighted  another  cigarette,  folded  his  arms 
on  the  table,  and  looked  at  me.  "I  knew  everything 
there  was  to  know  about  Paramore  before  he  died," 
he  affirmed.  "  I  didn't  in  the  least  want  to  know  any 
of  it,  but  it  was  inevitable.  He  had  no  control  over  his 
mental  muscles — complete  paralysis  of  the  reticent 
nerve,  you  might  say.  I  know,  I  tell  you.  If  you  don't 
choose  to  believe  it — you'll  have  doubted  my  word, 
that's  all.  I  have  all  the  evidence  there  is;  and  why 
should  I  lie  about  it?" 

"Oh,  I  believe  it — but  it's  extraordinary." 
"Should  I  be  here  if  it  weren't  extraordinary?  It's 
preposterous.  But  there  it  is." 

"And  the  rest,  you  said,  was  drama?" 
Hoyting  looked  out.  "Let's  go  to  a  cafe,"  he  said; 
"I  want  a  rest." 

310 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

I  assented.  There  is  something  in  the  transitori- 
ness  of  a  cafe  crowd  that  quiets  Hoyting.  No  one  can 
be  expected  to  stay  overnight  in  a  cafe.  He  likes  the 
restlessness,  the  ridiculous  suggestion  that  every  one 
else  may  be  as  foot-loose  as  he.  Besides,  Hoyting  is 
always  restive  under  the  strain  of  a  story;  he  chafes 
at  the  bounds  and  limits  of  any  rounded  episode.  He 
needs  to  draw  breath  and  come  back  to  it,  as  it  were, 
from  very  far.  So  we  ordered  things;  sitting  on  the 
very  edge  of  the  boulevard,  we  sipped  and  watched 
for  an  hour.  In  the  end  I  saw  signs  of  his  return  to 
the  matter  in  hand. 

"Beauty — "  he  began  suddenly,  pushing  his  glass 
aside,  "it's  something  I  never  see.  But  now  and 
then  a  man  or  a  woman  delights  me  curiously.  Ma 
dame  Pothier  was  like  that.  She  showed  you  what 
civilization  of  the  older  sort  can  do  when  it  likes. 
And  Paramore  saw  it,  too.  He  was  clean  gone  on  her. 
He  would  have  told  her  everything  if  he  had  had  any 
right  to.  I  said  it  wasn't  a  silly  tale  of  woman's  en 
nobling  influence,  didn't  I?  No  more  it  was.  Yet  he 
saw  her  as  soon  as  he  reached  Africa,  and  I  am  sure 
he  carried  her  image  into  the  interior  with  him — as 
311 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

he  once  did  Joan  Whitaker's,  only  with  an  immense 
difference,  after  all.  This  time  he  brought  back  truth 
instead  of  lies.  So  at  least  it  couldn't  have  been  a  bad 
image  to  live  with. 

"I  got  all  this  that  I've  been  telling  you,  in  bits 
and  snatches,  while  I  sat  with  him.  The  fever  didn't 
seem  so  bad  at  first — the  doctor  thought  we  could 
pull  him  through.  You  absolutely  never  know.  I 
never  thought  he  would  pull  through.  Those  very 
first  questions  of  his,  when  he  sat  peering  out  at  me 
through  the  mosquito-netting  of  his  bed,  didn't  seem 
to  come  from  a  man  who  had  life  before  him.  And 
when  I  had  got  those  early  details  out  of  him,  I 
somehow  felt  sure  he'd  go.  I'm  no  pessimist;  but  I 
didn't  see  life  giving  him  a  second  chance.  It  was  too 
much  to  hope  that  life  would  let  him  make  good  after 
all.  And  yet — he  so  nearly  did.  Damn  fever!  .  .  . 

"Madame  Pothier  did  everything  she  could.  She 
was  a  good  sort.  I've  always  wondered,  as  much  as  it 
is  permitted  to  wonder,  whether  she  felt  anything  for 
Paramore.  If  she  did,  I  am  sure  that  she  never  knew 
it.  There  are  women  like  that,  you  know.  I  don't  mean 
the  women  who  gaze  out  of  cold,  sexless  depths  at  the 


THE    CASE    OF    PA  RAM  ORE 

fires  burning  above,  and  wonder  pruriently  why  the 
fires  burn.  She  wasn't  that  kind.  I  mean  the  women 
who,  when  they  become  wives,  remain  women  only 
for  their  husbands.  I  don't  believe  it  would  ever  have 
occurred  to  her  that  any  man  save  Marcel  Pothier 
could  look  upon  her  with  romantic  interest.  I  don't 
pretend  to  understand  the  phenomenon,  but  I  know 
that  it  exists.  A  woman  like  that  simply  assumes  that 
she  is  no  longer  a  wandering  lure  constantly  crossing 
the  path  of  the  male.  She  thinks  all  men's  eyes  are 
veiled  because  hers  are.  A  very  pretty,  pathetic 
ostrich  trick.  Sometimes  it  doesn't  work,  but  aston 
ishingly  often  it  does.  With  Paramore  it  did.  All  I 
mean  is  that  she  hadn't  dreamed  Paramore  wor 
shipped  her.  She  remembered  him  as  a  friend  they 
had  made  two  years  before,  and  of  course  he  was  to 
come  to  them  out  of  that  pitiful  Mission  Hospital. 
No  one  in  Dakar  knew  anything  about  Paramore's 
fiasco.  He  wasn't  precisely  famous,  you  see.  Dakar 
was  perfectly  provincial.  And  Paramore  was  hoping, 
I  dare  say,  that  he  could  stave  off  the  tale  of  his  lie 
until  he  could  lay  before  her  the  news  of  his  atone 
ment  as  well.  The  hardest  thing  he  had  to  bear,  prob- 
313 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

ably,  was  dying  and  leaving  his  story  to  the  telling 
of  chance  tongues,  not  knowing  in  what  form  it 
would  eventually  come  to  her.  That,  I  am  convinced, 
is  why  he  told  me  so  much — let  his  parched  lips  artic 
ulate  those  memories  for  me.  But  not  once  did  he 
break  down  and  ask  me  to  tell  her.  Oh,  I've  good 
reason  for  respecting  Paramore — a  second-rate  re 
spect  it  must  always  be,  I  dare  say,  granted  that  ex 
traordinary  crumpling-up  in  Australia.  But  he  never 
crumpled  up  again. 

"For  a  day  or  two  he  hung  in  the  balance.  Then, 
after  one  exceedingly  bad  night,  which  left  Madame 
Pothier  blue  under  her  fine  eyes  and  white  round 
her  carved  lips,  he  had  his  last  coherent  hours  on 
earth.  .  .  . 

"I  shall  never  forget  that  morning.  Pothier  was 
away  on  duty.  There  were  only  the  doctor,  Madame 
Pothier,  and  I,  and  one  or  two  frightened  servants 
who  wouldn't  come  near.  They  thought  it  was  yellow 
fever.  Old  Seraphine,  Madame  Pothier's  Auvergnat 
maid,  hovered  round  in  the  corridors  with  a  rosary. 
You  could  hear  the  click  and  shake  of  it  in  the  still 
intervals.  Once  a  *Jc  vous  salue,  Marie,  pleine  de 
314 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MO  RE 

grace,'  cut  across  a  delirious  whispered  oath.  The  pit 
iful  part  of  it  was  that  there  was  nothing  to  do.  We 
just  had  to  lift  him  through  the  agony  and  weakness 
as  best  we  could  until  the  coma  should  set  in.  There 
is  nothing  romantic  about  coast  fever.  It  attacks  you 
in  the  most  sordid  ways — deprives  you  first  of  dignity 
and  then  of  life.  Yet  poor  Paramore's  death-bed  had 
a  kind  of  nobility;  perhaps  because  Madame  Po- 
thier  was  there.  She  was  dressed  in  white  and  looked 
as  wan  and  distant  and  compassionate  as  a  nun.  The 
straight  black  masses  of  her  hair,  arranged  in  an  odd, 
angular  way,  looked  like  some  kind  of  conventual 
cap.  Paramore's  eyes  followed  her  about.  .  .  . 

"  It  was  that  morning  he  gave  me  the  packet — told 
me  where  it  was,  made  me  get  it  out  and  take  formal 
possession  of  it  before  him.  Once,  when  the  demon 
was  leaving  him  a  little  quiet,  he  lifted  his  right  hand. 
*I  swear  by — by  all  I  hold  sacred*  (his  eyes  were 
fixed  on  her,  though  he  was  speaking  to  me)  'that  I 
have  told  nothing  there  that  is  not  true.  All  second 
hand  reports  are  in  a  note-book  by  themselves.  It  is 
labelled.  Tell  Beckwith  especially  about  the  Sabbath. 
Beckwith  ought  to  follow  it  up.  I  sat  in  the  hut  by 
315 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  AM  ORE 

the  sorcerer  in  his  trance  and  waited  for  his  spirit  to 
come  back.  When  he  waked,  he  said  he  had  delivered 
my  message.  He  had  delivered  it.  Three  days  later, 
the  man  I  had  sent  for  came  running  into  the 
village.  The  sorcerer  had  told  him,  as  he  said  he 
would,  on  the  way  to  the  Sabbath.  I  depose  solemnly 
that  the  man  came.  His  village  was  three  days  away. 
He  had  heard  a  voice  at  his  door  the  night  of  the 
Sabbath — a  voice  that  gave  my  message,  that  said 
it  was  in  haste  and  could  not  stay.  Very  curious. 
Beckwith  ought  to  know.  It's  all  there;  but  tell  him. 
Of  course,  I  never  could  get  anything  out  of  the  sor 
cerer  about  the  Sabbath.  But  Beckwith  might  put  it 
in  a  foot-note,  if  they  won't  print  me'  Then  the 
sordid  agony  again.  .  .  .  Madame  Pothier  and  the 
doctor  didn't  understand  English,  by  the  way,  and 
of  course  didn't,  in  any  case,  understand  the  situa 
tion.  They  hadn't  listened  to  what  I  had  listened  to, 
all  those  earlier  days.  So  when  the  doctor  told  me 
fussily  that  Paramore  oughtn't  to  talk  and  that 
death  was  only  a  few  hours  off,  I  paid  no  attention. 
Why  shouldn't  he  talk  if  death  was  so  near?  The 
only  thing  I  could  do  for  Paramore  was  to  let 
316 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

him  talk  when  he  had  strength.   I  sat  tight  and 
listened." 

Hoy  ting  stopped.  The  lights  winked  out  along  the 
boulevard.  Night  had  fallen  with  capricious  sudden 
ness.  I  ordered  more  drinks  quietly.  Hoyting  was 
breathing  hard;  tired  out,  and,  as  I  thought,  very 
weary  of  it  all,  longing  to  slip  the  leash  and  be  off. 
The  air  was  cool  and  soft,  and  the  crowd  was  thin 
ning  a  little.  People  wrere  dining  and  making  ready 
to  "go  on."  I  couldn't  have  stirred,  but  that  worn 
packet  suddenly  felt  very  heavy  in  m'y  pocket. 

Hoyting  began  sipping  vermouth  again.  Finally 
he  spoke.  "He  didn't  say  a  great  deal  more.  The  end 
was  too  near.  But  he  spoke  very  clearly  when  he  did 
speak;  and  whenever  his  eyes  were  open,  they  were 
fixed  on  Madame  Pothier.  Towards  the  last  he  put 
out  his  hand  to  me.  I  was  holding  the  note-books — 
I  shouldn't  have  dared  put  them  down  so  long  as  he 
was  conscious.  *  There  is  only  one  woman  in  the 
world,'  he  said,  'and  she  belongs  to  Pothier.  Look  at 
her.'  I  didn't  look  at  her,  and  he  went  on:  'There 
may  be  other  women  alive,  but  I  can't  believe  it.  Do 
you  believe  it?* 

317 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

"He  wasn't  wandering,  you  know.  His  mind  had 
merely  stripped  his  situation  to  its  essentials;  he 
was  quite  alone  with  the  only  facts  that  counted. 
He  had  summed  life  up,  and  didn't  have  to  keep 
truce  any  longer  with  mortal  perspectives.  He  drew 
the  real  things  round  him  like  a  cloak.  .  .  .  Absurd  to 
talk  of  inconsequence;  there  was  no  inconsequence. 

"I  bent  over  him.  'I'm  not  blind,  Paramore.' 

"'No,  but  I  am — blessedly  blind.  .  .  .  And  some 
day  she'll  hate  me,  you  think?' 

"His  lips  were  straining  to  ask  me  to  see  to  it  that 
she  didn't,  but  he  controlled  them.  That — as  much 
as  anything — is  why  I'm  here  with  you  now.  It  was 
more  than  decent  of  him;  it  was  fine.  But,  by  the 
same  token  that  he  couldn't  ask,  I  couldn't  promise 
— though  I  saw  that  another  crise  was  near  and  the 
doctor  was  crossing  over  to  the  bed. 

"'I  don't  believe  she  ever  will,'  I  said.  'There's 
so  much  she'll  never  know.' 

"I  was  thinking  of  his  forlorn  and  beautiful  passion 

for  her,  which  she  would  have  hated  him  for,  because 

she  would  always  have  been  afraid  it  was  somehow 

her  fault.  Not  quite  fair  when  you  work  it  out,  but 

318 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

those  women  are  like  that.  I  saw  in  a  flash,  though 
— he  took  his  eyes  off  her  and  looked  at  me,  just 
once — that  he  thought  I  meant  his  miserable,  dis 
credited  past.  Then  the  doctor  thrust  me  aside.  The 
matter  was  never  explained  between  us. 

"There  were  only  one  or  two  more  speeches  of 
Paramore's  to  record.  The  monosyllables  wrung  out 
of  his  weakness  didn't  count — except,  immensely,  for 
pity.  Very  likely  you  know  what  the  fatal  fever  symp 
toms  are — ugly  beyond  compare.  I  won't  go  into 
that.  We  were  all  pretty  nearly  done  by  the  time  the 
blessed  coma  settled  over  him.  He  opened  his  eyes 
just  once  more  and  fixed  them  on  Madame  Pothier, 
who  stood  at  the  foot  of  the  bed.  All  his  strength  was 
in  his  poor  eyes:  his  body  was  a  corpse  already.  It 
was  to  me  he  spoke,  but  he  looked  at  her  until  the 
lids  fell.  'Damn  Whitaker!  He's  a  worm;  but  not 
such  a  worm  as  I.' 

"A  strange  little  blur  came  over  his  eyes.  I  turned 
my  head  for  one  instant.  Madame  Pothier,  weeping, 
was  holding  up  a  crucifix.  'I  don't  believe  God 
knows,'  he  said.  The  words  came  very  slowly  from 
far  down  in  his  throat.  We  heard  the  voice  just  once 
319 


THE    CASE    OF    PARAMORE 

more.  'Madame!'  Then  the  eyes  shut,  and  the  sched 
uled  number  of  hours  followed,  during  which  he  was 
completely  unconscious,  until  he  died  officially." 

Hoyting  smoked  quietly  for  a  moment.  Then  he 
spoke  hurriedly,  as  if  he  had  to  complete  a  report. 
"We  buried  him  out  there.  The  Pothiers  were  per 
fect.  She  was  worn  out  by  the  strain  of  the  illness 
and  the  nursing,  but  not  more  than  any  one  would 
have  been  after  such  an  experience.  To  the  last  I 
searched  her  face  to  see  if  she  knew.  It  interested  me 
curiously.  I  gave  her  a  dozen  chances  to  question  me 
about  Paramore.  She  behaved  throughout  as  one  who 
had  no  suspicion.  She  was  polite  about  the  note 
books,  and  asked  if  they  were  to  be  edited,  but  she 
evidently  didn't  in  the  least  understand  what  he'd 
been  up  to.  He  was  a  *  grand  savant,'  she  was  sure, 
though  Pere  Bernard  thought,  perhaps,  his  powers 
could  have  been  more  fortunately  employed.  Of 
course,  ce  pauvre  monsieur  was  not  religious,  which 
must  be  a  great  regret  to  his  Catholic  friends.  She 
believed  firmly,  however,  that  the  Divine  Mercy  was 
infinite  and  that  there  were  more  ways  than  one  of 
making  a  good  death.  They  were  taking  the  liberty 
320 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

of  having  some  masses  said  for  his  soul.  Everything 
was  said  with  the  most  perfect  feeling,  the  utmost  sin 
cerity  and  gravity.  What  more  could  a  blind  woman 
have  .said?  I  haven't  a  shadow  of  doubt  that,  if  ever 
the  whole  story  were  forced  upon  Therese  Pothier,  she 
would  summon  her  intelligence  gallantly  and  under 
stand  it  all.  Only,  what  on  the  face  of  it  was  there  for 
her  to  understand?  ...  I  rather  wish  she  were 
dead." 

"You  wish—"  I  didn't  follow  him. 

"I'd  like  to  be  sure  that,  since  she'll  never  know 
the  whole  truth,  she'll  never  know  more  than  she 
knew  in  Dakar.  I  was  sorry  for  Paramore.  He  was 
tempted,  and  he  fell,  and  he  struggled  up  again 
and  damned  temptation  to  its  face.  Not  a  hero,  oh, 
no.  But  there  is  something  exhilarating  in  seeing  the 
elements  of  heroism  assemble  in  a  man  who  is  sup 
posed  to  be  a  putty  of  cowardice." 

It  was  late,  and,  though  Hoy  ting  had  not  yet  in 
formed  me  of  what  he  intended  me  to  do  with  the 
packet,  I  suggested  dining.  We  made  our  way  to 
a  very  secluded  and  unfashionable  restaurant,  and 
ate,  surrounded  by  French  commercial  types.  Over 
321 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

our  liqueurs,  I  asked  him  why  he  had  given  me  the 
note-books. 

"Why  did  you  give  me  this  stuff?" 

Hoyting  looked  surprised.  "I  can't  do  anything 
with  it.  I  don't  know  that  sort  of  person.  Can't  you 
look  up  the  man  Beckwith?  I  never  heard  of  him, 
but  he  ought  to  be  easy  to  find.  I  could  tell  all 
this  to  you,  but  I  couldn't  go  over  to  London  and 
tell  it  to  a  court  of  inquiry.  I  don't  hold  you  re 
sponsible  in  any  way,  of  course,  but  something  ought 
to  be  done.  I'm  taking  the  night  express  to  Genoa." 

"If  you  imagine  I'm  going  to  drop  down  from  the 
blue  on  Sir  James  Beckwith — "  I  began. 

Hoyting  shrugged  his  shoulders.  "You  at  least 
know  who  he  is,  apparently.  That  in  itself  is  a  sign." 

"But  no  one  will  read  the  tragic  stuff,"  I  cried. 
"And  yet  you  place  Paramore's  reputation  in  my 
hands.  You  do  make  me  responsible." 

Hoyting  looked  at  me  across  the  table,  smiling 
faintly  and  shaking  his  head. 

"Didn't  I  tell  you  that  I  don't  believe  we  can  re 
habilitate  him?  But  we  owe  it  to  him  to  put  his 
papers  in  the  right  hands.  Beckwith  couldn't  refuse 
322 


THE    CASE    OF    PARA  MORE 

to  take  them,  at  least;  and  then  our  duty  would  be 
done." 

I  took  the  "our"  without  flinching.  The  tale  of 
Paramore  had  weighed  on  me.  "I'll  do  it,"  I  said  at 
last — "but  never  again,  Hoyting." 

"Have  I  ever  made  such  a  request  before?"  he 
interrupted  sharply. 

"No,  never." 

"Then,  in  God's  name,  take  it!"  With  his  strong 
hand  he  made  a  gesture  as  if  to  sweep  it  all  away 
from  him.  The  liqueur  glasses  fell  with  a  broken 
tinkle  to  the  floor.  Hoyting  bit  his  lip.  "I  wouldn't 
have  the  things  back  in  my  fingers  again  for  anything 
under  heaven.  Good-bye." 

I  started  to  my  feet,  but  he  had  reached  the  door. 
He  had  the  luck  to  step  into  a  taxi  the  next  instant 
with  an  indescribable  farewell  gesture. 

It  was  part  of  Paramore's  persistent  bad  luck — 
the  devil  that  pursued  him  was  not  put  off  by  change 
of  scene — that  Sir  James  Beckwith  died  before  I 
could  make  an  appointment  with  him.  From  all  I 
have  heard  of  him,  he  certainly  was  the  man  to  go  to. 
Paramore's  note-books  were  coldly  accepted  in  the 
323 


THE    CASE    OF    PAR  A  MORE 

quarters  to  which  I  finally  took  them;  and  I  have 
always  suspected  that  if  my  mien  had  been  less  des 
perate,  they  would  have  been  politely  handed  back 
to  me.  No  faintest  echo  of  their  reception  has  ever 
come  to  me,  though  I  have,  entirely  on  their  account, 
subscribed  to  a  dozen  learned  journals.  I  do  not  ex 
pect  anything  to  happen,  at  this  late  date,  in  Para- 
more's  favor. 

There  is  little  reason  to  believe  that  the  packet 
Hoyting  cherished  will  be  piously  guarded  by  the 
hands  to  which  I  committed  it.  And,  even  if  it 
were,  no  minor  corroborations  drifting  in  after  many 
years  could  ever  reconstitute  for  Paramore  such  a 
fame  as  he  once  lost.  When  I  think  of  the  matter  at 
all,  it  is,  curiously  enough,  to  echo  Hoyting's  wish 
that  Madame  Pothier  would  die.  The  best  thing  Para- 
more's  restless  ghost  can  hope  for,  it  seems  to  me,  is 
that  she  may  never  know  the  very  little  the  Public 
knows  about  him.  Sometimes  that  silence  seems  to 
me  more  desirable  for  him  than  rehabilitation  itself. 
But  then,  I  have  never  been  interested  in  anthro 
pology. 


324 


AN  INITIAL  FINE  OF  25  CENTS 

OVERDUE. 


LD  21-95m-7,'37 


YB  ^7453 


,  1 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


